Re: Can't restart slave - Could not initialize master info structure

[Rick James]

Strange.

Do you have the binlogs on the master being automatically purged? If so, that would explain eventually being unable to catchup on the slave.

Stopping the Slave service should stop replication gracefully.

The Master writes replication stuff to the "binlog", which is continually sent to the slave(s), which write the stuff to the "relay log". In a separate Slave thread, the stuff in the relay log is executed. When the latter thread is through with a relay log file, it deletes it.

"master.info" is the file on the Slave that keeps track of where it 'left off'. If that file is unreadable, or somehow lost, the slave has no way to know where to continue replicating. Check the existence, permissions on, and contents of that file.

I stop and restart slaves "all the time".