SMF recovery for a noob......

[evilstevie]

I've maintained an SMF forum for a few years for a local club, and a few weeks ago it died an untimely death for some unknown reason.    I'm now getting a "database error" when attempting to access the forum.    Is there an easy way for me to recover the contents of the forum, or should I just delete the old (broken) forum, reinstall,  and just forget about all of the old posts?
I'm far from proficient in anything related to html, but if all of the old forum data was contained in a single file that I could simply paste into the new SMF directory, I could probably muster that up.

Thanks for any help.

[mashby]

Man, that stinks. Do you have access to cPanel on your hosting account? That would be the first place to look for your database. You may also reach out to your host to see if they might be having issues with the database server. That is the really important thing. All of the site files are very replaceable. Avatars/attachments are the second most important items. I wouldn't delete anything quite yet. What is the URL of your troubled forum?

[Illori]

what is the exact database error you are getting? if we know that we can help you try to resolve it.

[evilstevie]

Pretty generic error:

Database Error
Please try again. If you come back to this error screen, report the error to an administrator.

Initially, I was getting no error at all, when I clicked on the forum link it would just time out without any error message.     I then upgraded to the latest SMF version, and I now am getting the above database error.     

I don't think I have cPanel.    My host used Directadmin, and there's a file manager app included with that.

I swear this issue originated with my host, as all of my other scripts also stopped working at the same time.     I don't know enough to prove or troubleshoot too much, so I'll be happy just to get things restored or at least re-created.

[mashby]

Found a demo of DirectAdmin. Do you see MySQL Management? That has a Repair option that might be of some use. Check maybe as well. And there's a Create/Restore Backups option. Does that error message appear all of the time or on a specific page?