MySQL on Windows Refuses to Start as a Service
It seems it all came down to the &quot; &quot; which it didn't like.
So I changed:
G:/mysql57/bin/mysqld.exe --install MySQL57 --defaults-file=&quot;G:/mysql57/my.ini&quot;
to
G:/mysql57/bin/mysqld.exe --install MySQL57 --defaults-file=G:/mysql57/my.ini
and it started up straight away. I can only assume this is something to do with Windows Server 2012, as I repeated the whole process (with &quot; &quot;) on my Windows 10 PC, and it worked fine.