Following the directions pointed to (thanks for that link) I ran into some problems. First of all, I locked the database from changes by removing the wiki-user's INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE privileges. However, the instructions do not tell you when you need to restore the wiki-user's privileges. I realized this when,during the install process, things seemed to be going well but ran into an error message part way through that seemed to indicate something the wiki-user was unable to do. So, I restored the wiki-user's INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE privileges and ran the install process again. Instead of the messages I got before (that tables were found...good...etc.) I just got the instant "your wiki is setup" message. Now I have a blank fresh wiki.
I'm not sure what I did wrong but the bottom line is that I need to restore from my wiki backup.sql. However, (next problem) the backup.sql looks a wee bit incomplete. For one thing it is missing the " ### DATABASE DUMP COMPLETED ###" message at the end. The good news is that it seems to have the INSERT commands for all of the tables (ending after a long list of "INSERT INTO `watchlist` VALUES"). However, when I try to restore using phpmyadmin (using the SQL tab and browsing to the file - hitting GO) I get a "No SQL Query!".
So questions 1 & 2: does it appear that my backup file is incomplete? And if so, can I add the text to the end to make it appear complete (because it looks like almost all of it is there). If someone could look at the end of their mediawiki's dump and tell me what comes after the "INSERT INTO `watchlist` VALUES", I'd greatly appreciate it.
I also tried to restore from the command line using: *mysql -u rootuser -prootpw mywiki **< /tmp/__DB__mywiki.sql*
but I get a "Can't create database 'mywiki_db'; database exists" message no matter whether I'm trying to restore the database of the original name or a new blank (no tables) database that I created with a different name.
As you can probably tell, I'm not a real MySQL or mediawiki guru. : (
If I can make the backup.sql file valid by adding whatever it needs at the end and figure out the correct procedure for restoring it, I'm assuming I can make another run at the upgrade.
Thanks in advance to any who take pity on this poor soul.