old phpmyadmin on another drive

  • Hello. I was developing a site on a localhost installation through xampp.

    Then my computer died. This was a laptop and I got usb adapter so I could at least access the harddrive.

    Then I reinstalled xampp and wordpress on the C drive of my current computer.

    But, my old phpadmin is now on the E drive and I don’t know how I can open it to retrieve some of the old pages I was working on. Using the xampp control panel only lets me get the phpadmin on my C drive.

    Does anyone know how it can be done that you can get the phpadmin that is stored on another drive through another xampp installation?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Dion

    (@diondesigns)

    phpMyAdmin will not solve your problem; that is an application to manage databases.

    You are looking for your old database. That would have been stored in your old XAMPP installation wherever it installed MySQL. Usually it will be a directory named mysql, and that directory will contain directories named bin and data (possibly among others). If you find it, look in the data directory for a directory with the same name as your old database. Let’s call it old_db. Now look in that directory. If you see any files with the extension .ibd, that database is gone forever. If there are no .ibd files, then there is hope, and read the next paragraph.

    Now go to your current XAMPP installation and repeat the process to locate the MySQL data directory. Once you find it, copy the old_db directory from your old XAMPP installation to the data firectory in your new XAMPP installation. If you are a very lucky person, that database should show up without errors in your new phpMyAdmin.

    The reason those .ibd files are a problem is that it means you are using InnoDB tables. Under normal circumstances, InnoDB is great. But they have a few drawbacks, the most serious being that all data is lost forever if the InnoDB ibdata file becomes invalid (which happens when you re-install XAMPP).

    In my opinion, every localhost installation (XAMPP, MAMP, WAMP, whatever) should have the following line in their MySQL configuration file:

    default-storage-engine=MyISAM

    This will tell MySQL to not use InnoDB to create new tables unless InnoDB is specifically requested. MyISAM tables are slower than InnoDB, but they can be recovered if the localhost application must be re-installed.

    Thread Starter JukeBoxWhiz

    (@jukeboxwhiz)

    Hi there. Thanks for your response.

    Yes, there are .ibd files in the data directory.

    However, I’m not sure what you mean by the XAMPP reinstall. I did not reinstall XAMPP on the old drive. Rather I installed it on the drive of my current computer. The other drive, the external one, still has it’s original XAMPP installation.

    I don’t know if this really makes a difference, but at this point I’m hoping against hope because that was a lot of work and it will take a bit of time to replicate it.

    Dion

    (@diondesigns)

    Hmm. if that’s what you did, then I have another suggestion. Rename the MySQL data directory in your new XAMPP installation, and then copy the MySQL data directory from your old XAMPP installation.

    As long as the old MySQL data directory did not get corrupted, this will work. However, it will restore all MySQL user data from your old installation, so make sure you remember the password you originally set for the root DB user! (Note that it is possible to reset the root password, but doing so is well beyond the scope of this support board.)

    Good luck!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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