Cannot start session without errors in phpMyAdmin

The problem can be due to file and folder permissions; You can try changing the folder permissions:

sudo chmod 777 /var/lib/php/session/

This will set full read/write permissions on the PHP sessions folder.

Note: the php/session/ folder may be in a different location on some servers. Check your php.ini for your session path.

In my case it was the wrong ownership for /var/lib/php/session. I changed that to the Apache user and group (the user and group that the webserver runs as) and all was well.

Problem usually lies on your browser end.

You need to flush your browser cache, delete the cookies for the server/host and then retry loading phpMyAdmin.

If you want to go all out, clear out the session folder on the server as well.

One possible reason for this is a session data mismatch between the browser and the webserver causing it to not be able to pull out the required session info and dumping this error dialogue on your lap.