How to create an ADMIN manually (solution to step 2 installation freeze)

If your installation hangs on step 2 (creates all the tables but doesn’t populate tables with any admin user), then you can create the admin user manually. This assumes you have direct access to your MySQL database:

1) in WP_USERS enter the following values for the following fields:
user_login: admin
user_pass: [anything]
user_email: [your email]
user_registered: [the date]
display_name: [a display name]
user_nicename: [a nicname]

2) in the WP_USERMETA table enter the following values for the follwoing fields:

user_id: 1
meta_key: wp_user_level
meta_value: 10

In another row in the same table enter these values:

user_id: 1
meta_key: wp_capabilities
meta_value: “a:1:{s:13:”administrator”;b:1;}” (without the quotes)

3) Go to wp/wp-login.php in your browser. Click on “Lost your password?”. Enter:

username: admin
email:[your email](same as entered into table)

Click on “retrieve password”

wordpress will generate a new password and store it.

4) Use the password wordpress emails you to login to admin

If anyone’s interested, I just read through wp-admin/install.php and took the relevant values from there.

This worked for me. Hope it’s useful to someone else.