If the mysqld server doesn't start or if you can cause it to crash quickly, you can try to create a trace file to find the problem.

To do this, you must have a mysqld that has been compiled with debugging support. You can check this by executing mysqld -V. If the version number ends with -debug, it's compiled with support for trace files. (On Windows, the debugging server is named mysqld-debug rather than mysqld as of MySQL 4.1.)

Start the mysqld server with a trace log in /tmp/mysqld.trace on Unix or C:\mysqld.trace on Windows:

shell> mysqld --debug

On Windows, you should also use the --standalone flag to not start mysqld as a service. In a console window, use this command:

C:\> mysqld-debug --debug --standalone

After this, you can use the mysql.exe command-line tool in a second console window to reproduce the problem. You can stop the mysqld server with mysqladmin shutdown.

Note that the trace file become very big! If you want to generate a smaller trace file, you can use debugging options something like this:

mysqld --debug=d,info,error,query,general,where:O,/tmp/mysqld.trace

This only prints information with the most interesting tags to the trace file.

If you make a bug report about this, please only send the lines from the trace file to the appropriate mailing list where something seems to go wrong! If you can't locate the wrong place, you can ftp the trace file, together with a full bug report, to ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/upload/ so that a MySQL developer can take a look at it.

The trace file is made with the DBUG package by Fred Fish. See Section E.3, “The DBUG Package”.