Hi I know it's quite late, but maybe helps others..
Today I found one of my servers with the same problem as yours..
I restarted MySQL, didn't change a thing.. tried to upgrade MySQL nothing..
so, thank God there is another way to create your Database, user, and pass, instead of using the root account, log in as the USER you created, in there you'll be able to create database, user, pass..
yet, it's not the proper solution, but I'm hoping to find a fix to this in this forum..