Supplied password for mysql in one-click-lamp instance doesn't work

I’ve just setup a new one-click-lamp instance and am having trouble accessing MySQL. I’ve always used phpmyadmin to manage my databases so I installed that following the guides here. Once installed I tried to login using ‘root’ and the password supplied in the /root/.digitalocean_password file. This didn’t work right from the start.

I’ve since tried many methods on various help threads to try and reset the root password and I still can’t login. The only user I can login to phpmyadmin with is ‘phpmyadmin’ and the password is in /etc/phpmyadmin/config-db.php. This user has zero permissions though and can’t do anything.

The other weird thing(I think) is that if I run the ‘MySQL -u root -p’ in my CLI, I can use any old password or none at all and I can run MySQL commands there all I like. Is this normal?

I’m not sure what’s going on or if somehow in my various attempts to reset the root password I’ve screwed it all up. It never worked from the start though and I can’t seem to figure it out.

Any help would be appreciated. I may have to try a whole new droplet to see if this is normal.

Cheers.