We have SMF 2.0.15 on Drive D. had to get a new drive, so put an SSD in for C Drive (went from Win7 to Win10 on the new C drive), and SMF forum stayed on the sata hard drive D:/SMF/. The forum had problems so we went to run an upgrade with the latest and greatest RC2 upgrade version, and got database error about 'descending indexes' in the install (downloaded and installed the upgrade files) running the upgrade.php, for SMF - RC2. Could not find any references for this database problem and 'descending indexes'. Looked al over the Internet. I don't know SQL that well only dabbled over the years with some forum installs. Sorry, I didn't keep the whole sentence of the error with that problem. My guess is the MySQL was a version that didn't match this.
Long story short ended up with more errors trying to fix things, now just doing a new install with SMF, could not overcome errors with no explanations on issues. The install ran good on upgrade page until it got to #4. Tables. Then it complained about negative values, Descending numbers, etc.
Forum is only used by maybe 20 people at most, private for friends who fly flight sims.
Also, ran fine many, many years, on home computers, also for a while on public webservers like godaddy. or other, now back on home computer with a no-ip redirect. So, SMF gave us at least 15 years of good times. Sorry we had to give up on upgrade and going with new install trying to save old data using admin tools in forum.
If anyone understands the error messages on database and descending indexes please tell. Thanx.
Also ran into an issue where cannot change the name of the folder where forum is located SMF to something else, it complains saying the files are in use. I think the SQL is tied in to the operating system and will not let go. Simple terms.
Thanx
This could be touchy, I'm not too familiar with running a site completely on a local system, but is the location of the database data stored on the hard drive too? If so, my next question would be whether the database data is also located in a sub-directory of the d:/smf/ as well? Because if not, then that tells me that when you moved everything to the zip drive, the current copy of the database files has changed since the move... good luck
If you could give us the actual error message, that'd help massively.