WP inaccessible on local installation after reinstalling WP

  • I installed WP on my computer so that I could learn how it works and figure out if I could create the database I want by using it. (I’m no coder and know squat about PHP, so making my messes offline seemed like a good idea.) I worked on my project for a while a few months ago, but then I had to put it aside, and I’m only returning to it now. I went into my project and updated WP and various other things. To follow a suggestion for a Types-based DB, I wanted to create a new local site. In the course of trying to figure out how to do that, I looked at WAMP Server, and noticed a message that there was an update to phpMyAdmin. I tried to install the update, but something went wrong. I tried to revert, but that didn’t succeed either. Eventually I reinstalled WAMP Server completely. But when I went into WP, I was presented with the screen for doing an installation. I tried to do that, but I got a long list of errors (e.g., “Table ‘test_wordpress.wp_users’ doesn’t exist”). I tried again after clearing my browser cache, but no luck. Finally I reinstalled manually following the instructions at https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Updating_WordPress#Manual_Update, but with the same result. So … now what?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Did you lose all of your data from the phpMyAdmin update? Is your question about trying to recover that data or about just trying to get a fresh installation of WordPress again?

    Thread Starter nellhaus

    (@nellhaus)

    Hi David, I don’t know whether I lost data from phpMyAdmin or not — as I mentioned, I don’t have in-depth knowledge of these things, so I don’t even know where to look. My questions is, how can I stop WordPress from failing my various attempts to reinstall it, so that I can get access to the database I was working on? Or if I have to completely uninstall both WordPress and WAMP Server from my computer, how can I do that do I don’t lose the work I did?

    I’m sorry for the late response to this. I’m hoping that you didn’t lose your data, but it’s pretty concerning that you’re being prompted to do the installation each time.
    Did you create any posts, pages or navigation menus in your original site? If so, do you know how to use phpMyAdmin to browse the tables in your database? Look through the database and try to find the table wp_posts to see if there are any rows in that table that match the posts, pages, etc that you may have created previously. This document will help you to understand the database better (if you’re interested): https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Database_Description.

    If you aren’t able to find anything that looks familiar to you in the database, then you may have lost all of your data when you updated phpMyAdmin. Based on the phpMyAdmin documentation (https://docs.phpmyadmin.net/en/latest/setup.html#zero-configuration), I don’t see why an update to phpMyAdmin would have affected your WordPress database, though.

    Thread Starter nellhaus

    (@nellhaus)

    Hi David, thanks for following up. It looks like phpMyAdmin knows there’s supposed to be a wp_posts table and its structure, but when I try to look at the table, phpMyAdmin says it doesn’t exist. And when I search the folder in my hard drive (C:\wamp\www\mysite, yes?), that seems to be the case. Damn. But all the plug-ins (such as Pods, Jetpack, and a bunch of others) and themes are still there, which makes me think that it wasn’t the attempt to update phpMyAdmin per se that destroyed the data, but that whatever went wrong in that process did something that made WordPress want to reinstall and then constantly fail those installations, and that process blew out my work. Mainly I was experimenting with plugins to figure out what will meet my needs, entering a few dummy records so I could see the results, importing a bunch of records to test that process, trying out various themes, etc, so it’s hardly the end of the world; but even so, it was a considerable amount of labor.

    I’m guessing that at this point all I can do is remove WordPress and WAMP Server, and start all over. Since this is on my computer rather than a server, will this involve anything more than using the Windows uninstaller on WAMP Server and then deleting all of the WordPress files?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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