Unable to start mysqld after upgrading to 5.7

[Colin Webster]

I recently reinstalled mysql workbench and saw that the newer versions of mysql had performance monitoring so decided I would upgrade. My version was at 5.5 so I upgraded to 5.6. During the upgrade I was prompting if I wanted to keep my current config which I did. The install seemed to go smoothly so I went into workbench to check out the performance monitoring. It told me I needed to be 5.6.6 or higher and the upgrade I had done had only brought me to 5.6.3 so I figured I would upgrade to 5.7.

This time I did not get a prompt about my config file, but it seemed like the installation completed without problem. When I tried going into workbench it now says it cannot connect to the server. I SSH'd into the Ubuntu server and found the mysqld process was not running. I tried to start it and get the following error regardless of whether I run as sudo or not:-

2015-02-07T22:14:27.759363Z 0 [Warning] TIMESTAMP with implicit DEFAULT value is deprecated. Please use --explicit_defaults_for_timestamp server option (see documentation for more details).
2015-02-07T22:14:27.759474Z 0 [Note] mysqld (mysqld 5.7.5-m15) starting as process 12235 ...
2015-02-07T22:14:27.761814Z 0 [Warning] Can't create test file /var/lib/mysql/ServiceDesk.lower-test
2015-02-07T22:14:27.761841Z 0 [Warning] Can't create test file /var/lib/mysql/ServiceDesk.lower-test
mysqld: Can't change dir to '/var/lib/mysql/' (Errcode: 13 - Permission denied)
2015-02-07T22:14:27.761909Z 0 [ERROR] failed to set datadir to /var/lib/mysql/
2015-02-07T22:14:27.761924Z 0 [ERROR] Aborting

2015-02-07T22:14:27.761940Z 0 [Note] Binlog end
2015-02-07T22:14:27.761988Z 0 [Note] mysqld: Shutdown complete

I have been reading multiple posts all afternoon to try and find a solution. Most seem to point to the /var/lib/mysql folder not having mysql as its owner. I double checked that and it is set to :-

drwx------ 19 mysql mysql 4096 Feb 7 15:04 mysql

One other thing I found said to run mysqld with the --print-defaults switch to check if a previous my.cnf was interfering. I did have one, so I renamed it and verified that it was no longer being used, but I still get the same error.