Recently I was trying to install Mysql 5 installed via MacPorts, and I found a very helpful tutorial from hivelogic. Which all worked beautifully, but to get the server to launch properly at startup I needed to do a couple more steps. After googling around the errors I was getting I found out that I needed to run mysql_upgrade.

I got an error when I first tried to run myql_upgrade, so there were a couple of preparatory steps I needed to run:

Now run mysql_upgrade to repair the user tables.

Next I had to link the mysql database to the location that mysql looks for the user data by default

Then finally I had to change the ownership of the database files to the user that mysql server runs as.