MySQL 5.7 No Longer Returns Meaningful Error Messages When I select from a table that doesn't exist:


When I select a nonexistent column from an existing table:


I used to receive meaningful error messages (ie 'Error Code: 1054. Unknown column 'column' in 'table''), but now only the error number is returned, without an explanation of what happened. This happens to everyone that connect to this particular MySQL database.

Does anyone know how I can fix this without reinstalling MySQL? I'm running MySQL 5.7.9 Community Server (64-bit) on Windows Server 2012.
Looking through the MySQL error log, I noticed the following line: Can't find error-message file '\share\errmsg.sys'. Check error-message file location and 'lc-messages-dir' configuration directive. That file did not exist, however \share\english\errmsg.sys did exist. I found out from here that this error message is not entirely accurate, since MySQL does not actually look in the \share\ directory - it looks in the \share\*YOUR LANGUAGE*\ directory.

I looked in my my.ini and discovered that I had a line that said basedir = (that's all that the line said - there was no path after basedir). I'm not entirely sure how that configuration came to be, but I commented out that line and everything works great now!