Hi juggledad,
The new site appears to be working very well. I would like to explain the problems I had faced.
I am using Wordpress 3.3.1 and Atahualpa 3.7.3
1. When I was trying to import my database files I ran into the first problem. My database was 25MB. While importing with phpmyadmin it aborted the import. I found that the file size limit on phpmyadmin was 20MB and could not import it. It could not be increased, the host tech support could not increase it.
2. I tried another export of the file from phpmyadmin of the old server as a .sql.zip a compressed file. The compressed file size was less then 3MB. I tried importing this into the new host phpmyadmin but it would not change the table names. My new table names were baxxxxx_wp but my old table names were dryyyyy_wp so it just refused to work. Error messages were given. It looks like phpmyadmin would not change the table names if the database is imported as a compressed file.
3. The new host tech support offered to help me by allowing me to upload the drxxxyyyxxx.sql file (normal upload and not through phpmyadmin) and they would import it into phpmyadmin. I do not know whether they changed the table names to the new table or not as I do not know how they imported the database and I do not know how phpmyadmin works.... if there is an automatic feature or it has to be done manually for each and every table - tech support could have missed renaming some tables.
4. At that point my old host went offline due to the errors "Sorry for the inconvenience! The filesystem mounted at / on this server is running out of disk space...." as mentioned in my first message. And my new host began to give the "Error establishing a database connection". This error message is one of the most difficult to troubleshoot.
5. The only way out was to delete everything which is what I did and start over again.
6. I noticed that my old host had a cache in the Wordpress subdirectories /cache/. I had not installed any cache on my site and there was no plugin in my Wordpress for a cache. My guess is that the old host support tech had installed a cache without my knowledge to make their hosting services appear excellent. Actually it used to hang almost every weekend of late. This was occurring months before my site was hacked. (see
http://bachutha.com/false-teachings-...lim-terrorist/ ). I recovered from the hacking because I had just done my own backup of my site 3 days, before it was hacked. Please if you are reading this do not depend on the host daily or weekly backup. Those files will be corrupted by the hackers.
I do not know whether the hidden cache (it was active) was contributing to some of the problems. I do not even know whether the cache was from an earlier version of Wordpress or Atahualpa.
7. I had been working with the database and using Wordpress Tools Import feature to load everything. I had assumed the the import feature would import all the pages and posts. But unfortunately, I had not noticed that the import feature does not do an 'import and replace'. It was aborting the importing of postings and pages that were already in the system. The message it gave was ".... already exist" or something like that. I did not know the import was aborted when those messages showed up.
8. What made me suspect that something was a miss was when geolite database for the visitor count failed to install. This database was included in the original database.
9. In the end the only way round all these problems was to delete everything and reinstall Wordpress with an empty database and use Wordpress to import the xml files. For some reason that gave me another error. I can't remember what it was but it was related to the media library. Why? I do not know. The post and the pages imported without problems but gave 'media library' messages ... something about '...failed...'. .... I had been working on this transfer for almost 6 days and some days I had only 3 hours sleep. Actually, the first time I had tried this, it created the /upload/... sub-directories but did not save any thumbnails files there. I had to manually copy the files in (zip and unzip) from the old host.
10. I noticed that the 'continue reading...' links were not working properly and found some had no links while others had links. When I switched to twenty ten and twenty eleven themes everything seemed all right. Even the thumbnails (featured images) showed but not in Atahualpa. The Atahualpa import and export settings worked very well. I had checked each and every setting with those on the old host. They were identical.
11. At that point I decided to check the post by logging as administrator and trying to edit a post and see if the newly saved version would be correctly written into the database. It was then I found out that many of the post were truncated at the 'read more' tag. And that is why the 'continue reading..." links did not work. It was as if what you see on the screen as a visitor was exactly in the post... up to the 'continue reading ...' and text showing the URL with no link (in the correct colors).
12. There was only one way out and that was to manually copy and paste the html of each and every post from the old host to the new host. Guess what? That only took me an hour for 6o post instead of 6 days.
13. The blog is working beautifully.
14. The safest thing I had done? My blog has anywhere between 6 to 14 photos per post. All my pictures are stored in a 'picture' directory. This makes it very easy to zip, move and unzip my pictures. Luckily, I did not depend on uploading the pictures into the media library.
My concern are now
a. If your blog is corrupted by whatever ... hacker, ...etc, you will not be able to use the Wordpress Tools Import to overwrite the pages and posts.
b. phpmyadmin cannot be relied upon to import the databases.
c. It looks like phpmyadmin cannot be used if you are importing compressed databases ie .sgl.zip
I do hope this explains the situation I was in and it does help others in similar situations.
Thanks,
Peter
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