This error is a chown issue. I recently saw that my home brew directory was owned by root somehow and without thinking ran $ sudo chown -R $USER /usr/local/ which really probably messed more than just mysql owner privileges. However this is just about fixing mysql so it would boot up again. First I ran disk utility, which is usually a good idea, however it doesn’t fix /usr/local because that’s not default Mac OS X.
sudo chown -R mysql /usr/local/mysql/data/
This will set the owner back to the correct mysql user and it will again boot up. This is of course if you installed a custom mysql package into /usr/local/










Backseat Drivers