How to recover crashed site?

hi-

after a bodged site update and a crashed database, my wordpress site no longer works.

initially, i was confronted with the “Error establishing a database connection”-message. by drilling down in the code, i established that the problem was that the options-table was as good as empty. beside values for ‘cron’, ‘nonce_salt’ and a couple of ‘_site_transient_*’ values, there was nothing in it. the absence of a value for ‘siteurl’ caused the function is_blog_installed() to die with the “error establishing…”-error.

i am not sure how this has happened, and what other tables might be damaged or missing data (all the data is still there, and i have repaired all tables), but it seems re-populating the options-table is a first step. i have no backup (yes, i know); instead, i have entered all the options listed in wp-admin/includes/schema.php into the options-table, with the most appropriate values i can think of (which are the defaults in most cases). this has caused the error-message to disappear, but i am now confronted with a white screen displaying just “https://www.gonzocircus.comhttps://www.gonzocircus.com.”, which is the url of the site, repeated twice (currently, i’ve replaced this with a short “we’ll be back”-message).

is there a way of recovering my site, other than backing up the data, re-installing, and putting back the old data? any and all suggestions are welcome!
thanks,

maarten