XAMPP Installation on Windows XP Pro
Over the weekend just gone I spent a rather annoying amount of time attempting to install XAMPPlite onto my Windows XP computer. The download of the self extracting file and running of that file to extract it all onto the D: drive of the computer ran without any errors. Rebooting and then opening a web browser and typing “localhost” into the address bar brought up the default web page without any problem.
That page suggested that the next thing to do was to click the “status” link so I did that. That is where I discovered the problem.
Everything appeared to have installed correctly except for mySQL. I spent literally hours trying to figure out why mySQL wouldn’t start. Attempting to manually start the mysql service gave a 1067 error and when I checked the my.ini file there was no reference to the drive on the front of any of the file references. Adding d: to the front of the references didn’t help. It was only when I changed the references to D: that the mysql service decided to start up. Even then going back to the status page still showed mySQL as deactivated and when I rebooted the service refused to start again.
Next step was to delete everything and start over on the off chance that something had been corrupted in the first install. That didn’t help.
Checking in the event log I discovered that even though I had added D: to the front of the path names in the C:\windows\my.ini file the error messages were showing a file not found error with a path that didn’t have the drive letter on the front. This led me to believe that there was a second copy of the config file somewhere else and that both files needed to have the change made to them in order for the service to be able to find all the necessary files once it had started. I found such a file called my.cnf in the mysql\bin folder and made the same changes to that file that I had applied to the my.ini file.
Restarting the web browser and going to the status page finally showed that the mysql service was activated. Rebooting the computer and checking it again confirmed that the problem was finally solved.
Now all that remains to be done is to copy the databases and web pages from my Windows NT computer and I will then be able to test with two different versions each of Apache, PHP, and mySQL without having to upload anything to the web.
Tags: default web page, error 1067, my.ini, web browser, XAMPP Installation, xampp mysql