How to restore old forum fast

[phanhan]

Hi everyone.

I apologize in advance, because when I say I have no idea what I'm doing I mean it.  I've had someone walk me through to this point, but I'm on my own now.

I'm trying to restore a forum that was almost certainly running SMF 1.1.15, so that's what I'm using for the sake of compatibility.  There is no offsite host - I'm just trying to restore it on my computer.  I've built a database from the forum files, but when I try to access it via Wampserver I get the following message:

Connection Problems
Sorry, SMF was unable to connect to the database. This may be caused by the server being busy. Please try again later.

I have no idea what to do next, though the continuing refrain in Google searches seems to be "something wrong with your Settings.php file".  Unfortunately that's not very specific.

Thanks for your time.  Please bear in mind that I'm quite ignorant here - my apologies in advance.

[kat]

I've built a database from the forum files

Um... you can't do that. The database isn't a set of files. You need the old database. Without that, you can't revive your old forum.

The database and the files are completely different things.

Without that old database, you can create a new one, of course. But, you won't have your old members, posts, &c.