I think as of my last upgrade, I am running the Cream or spring release, and It seems I already have many of the newer tables installed already. Unfortunately my blog id shows as 8.8.6.2. what should I do?

It says I am running db schema # 8030 but that can't be right. perhaps I have to edit the settings table data?

I decided to scrap my whole old install and db, cause something was definitely screwey, now is there any way to re-install my old posts from my db backup? I'll post this as another thread too.

This happens with a bunch of tables, and it is quite annoying, I manually delete them and rerun the installer then it gets to a certain point an hangs and I have to start all over again.

Hmm, you say - a bunch of tables.

I do not thing the number of tables for b2evo has increased significantly.
Maybe just evo_antispam and evo_locales.

Are you sure you chose upgrading from a previous version of b2evolution?
If you did and still got an error, strange...

As about importing previous changes, I don't know. It would be the best to get it OK by restoring the backup and then running a normal upgrade of b2evolution. Maybe you need to look at the table structure you have AND determine which is the right db schema #.

Although it's very weird if you have a wrong db schema number.

I tried that, and I just went through the install using every possible schema # from 8030 upwards. I got errors every time.

I think the installer should have the "drop table if exists" query added as a failsafe vs. the schema # check.

I actually gave up on fixing this old install, and made a clean install of b2evo, now I need to import my old posts, any ideas on how to do this?

Were you using a CVS release on your live site?

If so, that's the problem. It has to be tweaked very carefully by hand to make the updater work. Try reading through the files in the install folder, to find out where the problem is happening.

i actually was using some files from a cvs, but that is now past tense.
I really, reall don't want to reinstall an old version just so I can reinstall the new version again.

isn't there an easy way to just import my old posts?

I really don't know.

What state are your old posts in? Another table in the DB? A text file? What?

That's a bit like the time an exasperated user had trashed his Outlook, and asked me, "Can't you just convert my phone list into an Excel spreadsheet!?" as if it was a simple thing that I was holding out on him. (Um... ooohhhkayyy... Where's your phone list now? If I knew that, I could begin to think about how to find an answer to the question.)

So, what's your backup? Have you looked at the file? Is it the raw database file? A big insert statement? A tab-delimited or comma-delimited text file suitable for a "Load data infile"? A zip or tarball? There's approximately 1.73 gillion things that "backup" could mean.

"drop table if exists" could have bad results. Maybe you don't WANT to drop the table, and an error is a better way to go.

The db backup is a .gz standard cpanel mysql database backup

the ungzed file reads like this:

-- MySQL dump 9.11
--
-- Host: localhost Database: blogadis_b2evolution
-- ------------------------------------------------------
-- Server version 4.0.20-standard

--
-- Table structure for table `evo_posts`
--

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS evo_posts;
CREATE TABLE evo_posts (
ID int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
post_author int(4) NOT NULL default '0',
post_date datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
post_status enum('published','deprecated','protected','private','draft') NOT NULL default 'published',
post_lang varchar(20) NOT NULL default 'en_US',
post_content text NOT NULL,
post_title text NOT NULL,
post_urltitle varchar(50) default NULL,
post_url varchar(250) default NULL,
post_category int(4) NOT NULL default '0',
post_trackbacks text,
post_autobr tinyint(4) NOT NULL default '1',
post_flags set('pingsdone','pbdone','tbdone','html','bbcode','gmcode','smartquotes','smileys','glossary','imported') default NULL,
post_karma int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
post_wordcount int(11) default NULL,
post_comments enum('disabled','open','closed') NOT NULL default 'open',
PRIMARY KEY (ID),
KEY post_date (post_date),
KEY post_category (post_category),
KEY post_author (post_author),
KEY post_status (post_status)
) TYPE=MyISAM;

--
-- Dumping data for table `evo_posts`
--

INSERT INTO evo_posts (ID, post_author, post_date, post_status, post_lang, post_content, post_title, post_urltitle, post_url, post_category, post_trackbacks, post_autobr, post_flags, post_karma, post_wordcount, post_comments) VALUES (25,1,'2003-12-06 10:05:51','published','en','','funky-m.com',NULL,NULL,31,'http://www.funky-m.com',0,'pingsdone,html,smileys',0,0,'open');
INSERT INTO evo_posts (ID, post_author, post_date, post_status, post_lang, post_content, post_title, post_urltitle, post_url, post_category, post_trackbacks, post_autobr, post_flags, post_karma, post_wordcount, post_comments) VALUES (22,1,'2003-12-05 09:02:53','published','en','He is helping me get the theme/skin/etc... here fixed. Maybe he can fix my image upload problem? ;)','Thanks to Gigantus (Tan)',NULL,NULL,1,'http://gig.viper007bond.com',1,'pingsdone,html,smileys',0,19,'open');

ok...

Then why don't you just run the insert statement in phpMyAdmin?

Am I missing something?

because if I run it, the webpage runs into many, many, errors.
This db schema is not the same as the new one, and I'm not sure what all the differences are, as the schema # was 8030, and I am sure it wasn't that one.
obviously some of the tables have been changed version to version, but I don't know what fields have been added, dropped, changed, etc... to convert the data myself. Also I'm not sure how to make these changes even if I knew what they were.

I guess I need to compare my db format to the new db format, find the differences and alter the content accordingly, but I'm not sure where to begin.

Here's an example of the new format, to compare with the old above:

--
-- Table structure for table `evo_posts`
--

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS evo_posts;
CREATE TABLE evo_posts (
ID int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
post_author int(4) NOT NULL default '0',
post_issue_date datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
post_mod_date datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
post_status enum('published','deprecated','protected','private','draft') NOT NULL default 'published',
post_locale varchar(20) NOT NULL default 'en-EU',
post_content text NOT NULL,
post_title text NOT NULL,
post_urltitle varchar(50) default NULL,
post_url varchar(250) default NULL,
post_category int(4) NOT NULL default '0',
post_autobr tinyint(4) NOT NULL default '1',
post_flags set('pingsdone','imported') default NULL,
post_karma int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
post_wordcount int(11) default NULL,
post_comments enum('disabled','open','closed') NOT NULL default 'open',
post_renderers varchar(179) NOT NULL default 'default',
PRIMARY KEY (ID),
UNIQUE KEY post_urltitle (post_urltitle),
KEY post_issue_date (post_issue_date),
KEY post_category (post_category),
KEY post_author (post_author),
KEY post_status (post_status)
) TYPE=MyISAM;

You can see definite differences in the post mod date, etc...