dougrdotnet

It appears that upon installation/upgrade of Mac to Snow Leapard (OSX 10.6) that the symbolic link (alias) to MySql is removed.
I wanted to make a note here for future reference on creating an alias using terminal on Mac.  Hope this helps you as well.

Following Snow Leapard upgrade with existimg MySql instance, MySql Server will not start.  The server folder cannot be found.  In order to fix, a symbolic link needs to be created in the folder where MySql Server is installed.  The link created will provide an alias which Snow Leopard will use to find the instance.
Creating an alias:
Using terminal as sudo cd into the local folder.

$ cd /user/local/

View contents of local to get the full name of MySql instance (something like mysql-5.0.67-osx10.5-x86)

$ ls

Create the alias “mysql”:

$ ln -s /user/local/[your MySql instance name]/ mysql

Open system preferences from apple menu and start MySql Server.

HTH!