I already wrote about the less information I got from migrating from version 5.0, 5.1 or 5.5 to version 5.6 on Windows, so … I’ll write about the way I do it. Yesterday you could read about creating backups and export your databases.
Firts of all, backup
The first step of every migration should be to create a backup of every database, as we already talk about it, with tools like MySQLdump, or you can do it with graphical tools such as heidiSQL or MySQL WordkBench. There are more, but theses are the one I normally use!
Copy the my.ini file
Although it can be a strange step, it’s very important to locate the MySQL configuration file MySQL my.ini, in my case, my path is C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Datos de programa\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5. You never know if you would need it!
Stop the server
This task is very easy, just by typing the command NET STOP mysql55 and the server will stop (mysql55 is the name of the server that deals with MySQL 5.5, the version of MySQL I am going to unistall).
Copy the data dir
This task is also very important, and in case you need to replace files, it’s good to hace the raw files … again, you never know what problems will show up, so every backup file could be used at any time!
Unistalling MySQL 5.5
You can do this task from Add and Remove programs.
Unistalling MySQL 5.5
Unistalling MySQL 5.5
Press YES, and it will proceed to unsitall MySQL 5.x:
Desinstalando MySQL 5.5
With this task, the step 2 is finished, and we conclude all related to backup and uninstall MySQL 5.5 (you can proceed exactly the same with MySQL 5.0 or MySQL 5.1).
The next step, step 3, is to install MySQL 5.6.10 GA, although the process is exactly the same if you need to install no matter what version of MySQL 5.x.
Have a nice day!