moving servers and upgrading versions breaks permalinks

Have you check the .htaccess file?

Everything appears in order; located at the home directory of the blog (whereas wordpress itself is in cgi/wordpress):

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Well, you should place the .htaccess file at the same directory as the index.php file.

it is

.htaccess might be disabled in cgi/.

tried moving it up a level, so that it resides at at [my www directory]/wordpress

no change.

Well I’m not so firm with the permalinks internals but somehow wordpress is not able any longer to resolve a permalink to your posts. The first thing suggested under such conditions is to rebuild the permalink structure that is by setting the options again. Often this already solves the problems. Have you tried switching permalink types?

Partial success: I had switched permalink types before, but saved it and then went back to the ‘month and day’ version (which is what I had been using). If I leave it at default, it works! But then all the old links to posts on my blog, both internal and external, will be broken.

It seems like there must be one place where I’ve got a munged setting, but no clue where it is.

Gentlemen, I greatly appreciate y’all helping me with this…thank you!

Maybe then a forced upgrade of your database might solve the issue.

Forced the upgrade; got this result:

WordPress database error: [Table ‘joeblog.wp_categories’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT * FROM wp_categories ORDER BY cat_ID

WordPress database error: [Table ‘joeblog.wp_post2cat’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT post_id, category_id FROM wp_post2cat GROUP BY post_id, category_id

WordPress database error: [Table ‘joeblog.wp_linkcategories’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM wp_linkcategories

Upgrade Complete

Your WordPress database has been successfully upgraded!

all three did exist in the version I brought over. I can try to re-export from the old blog and re-import it on the new server.

This shows that your data is corrupt, no wonder permalinks are broken. Backup and remove the faulty database and re-export the old one. Then run the upgrade script again.

Exported old 2.0.9 DB, backed up and deleted current DB, imported the 2.0.9 and ran the upgrade script, get the same result. (BTW, it appears the upgrade script changes the structure of the DB. The 2.0.9 db before upgrade has the following tables:

wp_categories
wp_comments
wp_linkcategories
wp_links
wp_options
wp_post2cat
wp_postmeta
wp_posts
wp_usermeta
wp_users

whereas the upgraded version of the same DB has these:

wp_comments
wp_links
wp_options
wp_postmeta
wp_posts
wp_terms
wp_term_relationships
wp_term_taxonomy
wp_usermeta
wp_users

which explains why those errors appeared on the forced upgrade…they had already been converted.
Again, permalinks work fine using the default permalink structure of

https://www.joewhite.com/?p=123

, but if I try to change to Day and Name

https://www.joewhite.com/2008/04/08/sample-post/

to maintain compatibility with external links to my posts, it fails.

Looks like you have got a character encoding problem on your site. maybe this breaks permlink compability.

the mbscript extension of php was not installed; got them to install it, but still having the same issue.

must be some PHP config issue somewhere; tried creating a brand-new 2.5 install, and got the same problem when I switch it to pretty permalinks.