Restore localhost site with WAMP

  • Last year I decided to make a local copy of my WordPress site so I could experiment with new templates and develop a whole new suite of pages. I installed WAMP (on my Windows 7 64-bit machine) and got busy developing.

    Then a week ago the laptop died. Luckily the hard disk is fine so I’m able to access all the data on another laptop, but now I’m trying to get that same dev version of the site up and running on the new machine (Windows 8 64-bit).

    I have installed WAMP and WordPress on the new machine (sticking with WordPress 3.9.2 because that was the version I was using previously). Now I’m trying to work out what steps I need to follow to get my old dev site working on the new machine. I wasn’t creating DB backups regularly, but presumably it’s fine if I can still access all the files, right? Is it as simple as just copying my old “wp-content” folder to the new machine (C:\wamp\www\wordpress)? Or are there other steps?

    Thanks!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter tomlemes

    (@tomlemes)

    Does anyone have any advice they can offer here? I can’t believe this is a particularly unusual situation. It seems that there must be a fairly straightforward way to recover my work seeing as I still have full access to the original hard disk.

    Apologies if I’ve posted this in the wrong forum group – if there’s a more appropriate location, could someone suggest it? Thanks! ??

    Tom

    I tried moving a WAMP installation to another machine, but as it “installs” itself when you do the WAMP installation, it’s not that easy. My fave local server, Uniform Server, does not do this; it can be run from a USB stick.

    Anyway, if you still have access to the old WAMP, it should be able to start up (make sure the new WAMP install is not running). If it does, open phpMyAdmin from the WAMP control panel and export the site’s database. Also copy the files from that site to the new WAMP ‘www’ folder.

    Shut down the old WAMP and start up the new one, open phpMyAdmin, create a new, empty database using the same name as the old one and import the exported SQL file into it. You shouldn’t have to edit the wp-config.php file as you are (should) be using the same path and database credentials.

    If all this does let you get back into the site, go to Settings > Permalinks and just re-save in order rebuild your .htaccess file.

    Thread Starter tomlemes

    (@tomlemes)

    Hi Lyle – thanks so much for your response. I feel like I’m about 98% there. I imported the old SQL file into a new database and I can now see all my old tables in the new DB. I also copied in all the old WAMP www files into the new WAMP www folder.

    However, now when I go to the expected path (https://localhost/wordpress/) I get the message: ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED. If I attempt to open the wordpress admin page (https://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/) it says: 

    Error establishing a database connection
This either means that the username and password
information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect
or we can't contact the database server at localhost.

    So I guess I need to reset the password or something? Apologies if I’ve arrived at a very basic question, but how is that done? I’ve tried resetting the password in the wp_users table, but not sure if I need to change it somewhere else too. Do I need to make manual changes to the wp_config.php file?

    If you made a change to the pwd in the wp_users table in the db, and set it to a readable value, e.g. mynewpassword, then you have to set the type as MD5 (select from the drop down list in the user_pass varchar(64) and then click Go.

    Then you do have to edit the pwd to this new value (mynewpassword, or whatever the readable version is) in wp-config.php.

    NOTE: make any edits to this type of file in a plain text editor, such as NotePad and NOT in a word processor, such as MS-Word.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • The topic ‘Restore localhost site with WAMP’ is closed to new replies.