mariadb broken

I am in the process of trying to upgrade debian from buster to bullseye. Updated mariadb to 10.5. Now it is badly broken. To to log into it with the mysql client. now it says Quote:

ERROR 1698 (28000): Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost'

Down graded it. It complained about that and said database file were moved to a different directory. Hope I can recover them, if I can ever log in to it again. Didn't help. Still does the same thing, won't let anyone use the database. Ran client as root and tried to reset password, no dice, when I try to run client with out root privileges it won't authenicate.