Recover your MySQL password

What if you’ve forgotten your MySQL root user password? This could be quite the predicament … had the developers not thought of that eventuality. In order to recover the password, you simply have to follow these steps:

1. Stop the current MySQL server process
2. Start the MySQL server with the command sudo mysqld_safe –skip-grant-tables –skip-networking &
3. Connect to the MySQL server as the root user with the command mysql -u root

At this point, you need to issue the following MySQL commands to reset the root password:

mysql> use mysql;
​mysql> update user set authentication_string=password('NEWPASSWORD') where user='root';
​mysql> flush privileges;
​mysql> quit

After this you can shutdown the mysql-server and start it the normal way.

(!) on very old mysql databases the “authentication_string” field is called “Password”. so the command looks like follows:

​mysql> update user set Password=password('NEWPASSWORD') where user='root';

source: [link]