I see the question has been asked before, but I really hope for more detailed answer. I am trying to bring together quite a large number of databases built over many years and am well down the path of converting them to MySQL. I am doing this on a spare Windows 7 64-bit machine with a view to possibly moving all to a "server" on the workgroup.
Now I have installed XAMPP. It installs its own instance of MySQL in C:\xampp. The existing install is in C:\Program Files\MySQL Both are 5.6.24, I believe.
I have done a mysqldump of the databases in my existing MySQL and then tried to stop its service, but get "Access is denied". To get round this I stopped the service via a program " SysInternals' Autoruns".
I have (I think) changed the port in XAMPP from 3306 to 3308 in the control panel and in My.ini in the appropriate directory, but then seem to have MySQL Workbench pointing at the newer server, but still looking at the older my.ini file.
In other words, it is all a mess.
Maybe the best approach will be to uninstall XAMPP and start again, pointing it to the directory where MySQL is already installed? If I do this will it pick up my existing schemas, or will I have to manually intervene in some way. I am rather worried that I will lose the work I have already done in the database conversions if I go ahead blindly.
I have never used Perl or PHP and only embarked on this in an attempt to be able to create a smooth way of printing out results of queries in simply formatted formats.