Trouble recovering a backup

[heldercervantes]

Hi,

I had to format my pc and reinstall everything from scratch. Now I'm having trouble getting a couple of sites working again on XAMPP.

Here's what I did:

1. Copied my entire htdocs folder to my backup drive, containing among other things my two websites;
2. Exported both site's databases from phpMyAdmin. Did two versions of each, one with "Enclose export in a transaction" and "Disable foreign key checks" checked, and another with these unchecked;
3. Formatted, reinstalled everything, smiled at my PC's recovered agility;
4. Copied htdocs back to the PC;
5. Created both databases on phpMyAdmin;
6. Imported the sql files again.

Launching the sites I get an internal server error. Can't see anything on Apache's logs.

I tried importing both versions of the databases to the same result. Checked DB collation setting on my web server's version of one of the sites to be latin1_swedish_ci, so I replicated that setting on my local database, and still got nothing.

Any ideas on what I can do next to get this working?

[teppo]

Internal server error could mean a lot of different things, but first of all, double check that you're really not seeing anything in the error logs, Apache or ProcessWire. Also, make sure that you're looking at the right error log files (not sure how XAMPP / it's Apache setup handles these). Error messages are your best bet on finding out what went wrong, after all.

I'd also check if a clean installation works, and if that doesn't work, check if a basic PHP application (preferably something that creates a database connection) works instead. That could give you some clues about the issue. If a clean installation won't work either, it's likely to be caused by some error/misconfiguration/change in your environment (XAMPP / Apache / PHP / MySQL).

Sorry, not much help from here, but those are the things I'd start with anyway.

[heldercervantes]

Thanks Teppo. I haven't thought of trying a clean install. Maybe I can even overwrite the database afterwards.

XAMPP's control panel offers 4 different logs: Apache's access.log and error.log, PHP's error log and MySQL's error log. Nothing in those except the entry on access.log. And since I can't fire up Processwire, I can't check that log.

But I'll do that clean install and check out the new Reno theme along the way.

[LostKobrakai]

You can always access the processwire logs in the place where they are saved: /site/assets/logs/.

[heldercervantes]

Thanks LostKobrakai. That did the trick. It had to be something this stupid. MySQL access denied

Changed it directly on config.php and there it was.