IIS, MySQL, WordPress, and The Famous 5-Minute Installation

Yesterday I was upgrading some programs on my home laptop and realized I had an old version of MySQL, 5.1. The current version is 5.6. The 5.1 version of MySQL was installed when I used Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer to install a test WordPress blog. This is a really easy way to checkout software when it works so I set out to upgrade MySQL to the latest version. Surprisingly there is no way to upgrade or remove MySQL using the Web Platform Installer. So I downloaded the community upgrade from www.mysql.com and ran the upgrade. It did not work. I kept getting an unhandled exception error message during the upgrade. Since I did not have any important information in the data base I uninstalled the current version and installed the 5.6 version. Now MySQL is working but I kept getting password errors when I tried to install a new blog using either the Web Platform Installer or Microsoft’s WebMatrix. So I did a complete MySQL reinstall using these instructions for Windows 7 from serverfault.com.

  1. Uninstall MySQL using the uninstaller.
  2. Delete C:\Program Files\MySQL
  3. Delete C:\Program Files (x86)\MySQL
  4. Delete C:\ProgramData\MySQL
  5. Delete from any Users’ AppData folders. Example: C:\Users\rdoverby\AppData\Roaming\MySQL
  6. Reinstall MySQL

This did not fix my problems with Web Platform Installer or WebMatrix. Since I had phpMyAdmin working under IIS and a working version of MySQL, I opted to try “The Famous 5-Minute Installation”. I copied an old WordPress installation to a new folder, followed the instructions, and in about five minutes I had a new WordPress blog working on my laptop.