Tuesday, October 28, 2008

HALP! I can haz database???

Hi folks, Ravyn here, with a plea for help of the database kind. Earlier this summer the forums broke somehow, i hadn't done anything to them and wasn't watching every day like usual, so i have no clue as to how it happened.

We are using phpBB (2.0 i believe) for our forums, and if you go to the page you will see a table missing error. i know nothing about databases, and i didn't know that simply copying the contents of the forums folders on the server wasn't enough to save a backup of it. So while it looks to me that the database is mostly intact, i don't know for sure how all the data, more than a year's worth of postings, can be salvaged.

Any database-savvy folks out there, please contact me here or email me at nora at ravyn dot com. i'd love to get the forums back up and running so we can get this part of the community going again.

Thanks!

- Ravyn

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Ryan,

I can point you in the right direction. What you have there is a corrupted table in your mysql database.

take a look at:
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?p=706824&highlight=&sid=5a2d5b640a967bdcc3d21c635c148619

You could try to run the following sql if you have an admin tool avalible.

REPAIR table phpbb_users;

Feel free to email me for help if you can't solve this.

I am happy to give back to you guys with my expertise.

Michael Bender
mbender@ausinc.com

Dan Guy said...

Have you confirmed that the table is still in the database?

I seem to recall logging in via the admin panel a while back and checking and the table wasn't showing up at all in phpMyAdmin.

ravyn said...

Dan - you are right, that table doesn't show up at all as far as i can tell.

Michael - i looked at that discussion thread and at the very end of it the person recommended restoring a backup. Which was the (oh-so-helpful) advice from the web host. i didn't know that they wouldn't have a backup.

So are we screwed?

Dan Guy said...

If the tables are totally gone, and there is no backup, then all of the postings are gone, yeah. All you can do is reinstall phpBB and then copy the skin back in.

ravyn said...

The only table missing is the users table, i was wondering if there was some way to extract the data from postings at least.

And, i looked at the tools at phpMyAdmin but i don't know enough about it to copy the database somewhere before doing anything else to it. Translation: i'm chicken. heh

Dan Guy said...

ORLY?

Well, in that case, just create a new users table full of users with names like "Sadly Deleted #1". Then you can let people claim their ID and you replace their names.

ravyn said...

i'm not sure how to do that. Is that something you could do for me? Please? :-)

lisa said...

I love you guys! Thanks!