Windows mysqld: Failed to find valid data directory

[Dave Atherton]

I installed MySQL 8.0.15 on 2 machines (Win7 and Win10) and get the same error. It was configured to NOT run as a Service; so, I tried to start the server using mysqld. It runs momentarily and puts this in the .err log:

2019-03-18T16:50:07.775338Z 0 [System] [MY-010116] [Server] C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 8.0\bin\mysqld (mysqld 8.0.15) starting as process 6760
2019-03-18T16:50:07.810338Z 1 [ERROR] [MY-011011] [Server] Failed to find valid data directory.
2019-03-18T16:50:08.027338Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-010119] [Server] Aborting
2019-03-18T16:50:08.028338Z 0 [System] [MY-010910] [Server] C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 8.0\bin\mysqld: Shutdown complete (mysqld 8.0.15) MySQL Community Server - GPL.

I verified that the datadir in my.ini exists. I added quotes to the datadir path but got the same error. I tried initializing the data dir but got errors:

C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 8.0\bin>mysqld --initialize --console
2019-03-18T20:48:58.967452Z 0 [System] [MY-013169] [Server] C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 8.0\bin\mysqld.exe (mysqld 8.0.15) initializing of server in progress as process 10004
2019-03-18T20:48:58.973453Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-010457] [Server] --initialize specified but the data directory has files in it. Aborting.
2019-03-18T20:48:59.006456Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-010119] [Server] Aborting

What am I overlooking?

Thanks,
Dave