david8787;10942860 wrote:Originally the way I changed the password was actually editing the password field in the user table of MySQL. Did I change the password incorrectly?
Normally the way you would set a password on an account is by running a query similar to:
SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('my_new_pass');
Also note that passwords are not stored in plain text format. Thus, if you modified the users table directly and just set the "password" column equal to your new password, then you've effectively broken that account and can't use it to login anymore.
This page in the MySQL manual explains how to set passwords.
EDIT: Note that if you did modify the users table correctly (e.g. using the PASSWORD() function), then you must still do one final step - flush the privileges. This page discusses the FLUSH syntax, but basically you just do:
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
after modifying the users table. Again, modifying the users table directly is not the recommended method of changing passwords.
If you've locked yourself out and can't login as any other account that has permissions to change passwords, you can reset the 'root' account's password by following the steps here.