Last night, I found myself debugging a MySQL issue at an ungodly hour. The MySQL80 service refused to start, throwing a vague error:

The MySQL80 service started and then stopped…

Digging into mysql.err, I discovered the culprit—someone (not me! 😤) had accidentally deleted a binary log (mysql-bin.000xxx) while MySQL was still tracking it. Since MySQL relies on binlogs for replication and crash recovery, it panicked when it couldn't find the missing file.

The Fix

To get MySQL running again, I had to:

  • Disable binary logging (since this is a standalone server)
  • Delete the corrupt binlog index file (mysql-bin.index)
  • Purge all old binlog files that were hogging disk space

How to Properly Disable Binary Logging in MySQL 8.0?

Since MySQL 8.0 enables binlogs by default, simply removing log-bin=mysql-bin from my.ini wasn’t enough. I had to:

Comment out the existing binlog setting in my.ini

# log-bin=mysql-bin

Explicitly disable binary logging

[mysqld]
skip-log-bin

Delete the old mysql-bin.index file

  • This file keeps track of all binary log files.
  • Since a referenced binlog file was deleted, MySQL would fail to start if the index still contained entries for missing files.
  • Deleting it ensures that MySQL doesn’t look for non-existent logs.

After restarting the service, I confirmed binlogging was off with: 

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'log_bin';

Output: 

log_bin | OFF

In conclusion, crisis averted, disk space reclaimed and finally got some sleep. 😴

Hope you found this useful!