Sorry for the outage & loss of Avatars!

[Megacruncher]

You won't have lost any of the original tables if you were following the upgrade procedure from phpBB v2 to v3 in section 5 here: http://www.phpbb.com/support/documents. ... =3#convert though they do warn you that some passwords get lost because of UTF-8 character set handling in V3.

Have another go... phpBB v3 has some nice new features for posting, handling spam, searches and a host of other goodies... persistence will be rewarded... :)

I followed all the v2 to v3 instructions. I, or my webhosts, need a newer version of PHP. I'll get onto them.

[PinkPenguin]

Are the files on ext2 or ext3 file system ?

[edit]As it's not exactly a text file the grep method won't work. You could try using foremost which you need to install on a separate partition http://sourceforge.net/projects/foremost/ there are some instructions here: http://www.howtoforge.com/recover-delet ... h-foremost[/edit]

[PinkPenguin]

I followed all the v2 to v3 instructions. I, or my webhosts, need a newer version of PHP. I'll get onto them.

... Could be tricky if it's an older kernel. I've had problems upgrading PHP on those. Any way let me or Wil St. Hill know if we do anything...

[Megacruncher]

Are the files on ext2 or ext3 file system ?

[edit]As it's not exactly a text file the grep method won't work. You could try using foremost which you need to install on a separate partition http://sourceforge.net/projects/foremost/ there are some instructions here: http://www.howtoforge.com/recover-delet ... h-foremost[/edit]

ext2 or 3 what that then?

I didn't delete a file, just a bunch of tables from the database which I thought I didn't need. Anyway would easyspace.com let me go rummaging about their database servers like that?

As a work around I manually added a phpbb_privmsgs table using parameters I managed to fish out of the 20B text file back up.

I've sent you a PM as a test. Please reply so I know the system works.

Only problem is I've lost all the old messages. Any idea how I could find them?

[PinkPenguin]

I didn't delete a file, just a bunch of tables from the database which I thought I didn't need. Anyway would easyspace.com let me go rummaging about their database servers like that?

I don't see why not... it's more fun that way....

problem is I've lost all the old messages. Any idea how I could find them?

The 20Mbyte text file backup should have a lot of insert commands to the same table for the data. You'll have to wipe the table you created and re-run both the CREATE TABLE and the INSERT/bulk INSERT commands for the same table.

[Megacruncher]

The 20Mbyte text file backup should have a lot of insert commands to the same table for the data. You'll have to wipe the table you created and re-run both the CREATE TABLE and the INSERT/bulk INSERT commands for the same table.

And there's the rub. I couldn't run a script with CREATE TABLE "no permissions" but I was able to go into phpMyAdmin and manually create a new table.

As you observed in your PM it's unlikely that anyone will be that bothered at the loss of the old messages. Having broken and more or less repaired the forum I'll cut my losses and stick with having effectively purged the PMs.

[PinkPenguin]

.... Agreed, now you've got things back to normal... you can start plotting another try at phpBB v3....