Old posts not displaying after upgrade

[waratah]

I'll try to post as much info as I can, if there's anything else you need let me know and I'll try to provide it asap. Not sure if the host has helped or made it worse at this point.

I've taken over a forum that's about 14 years old, old forum for a group of niche collectors. it was running SMF 1.1.21 on PHP 5.6.40 and now it's not functioning at all. The owner has given up, gave his login info to me and said it's mine, so I'm trying to see what I can do to salvage it. 

After undoing the mess it currently in was in by restoring from a backup (error messages and all) it currently has SMF 2.0.18 installed, using PHP 8.0.8, but I can't get any of the old posts or boards to load.

Settings are al the same as before except the table prefix. I had to use a new prefix based on the advice of my hosts tech support, because if I put in the old prefix the site would crash and I can't get into the settings to change the prefix again. Would basically have to then start over from the beginning.

Database name, username, password are all the same tho. Only thing that's different in the settings is the prefix, but if I change it the site goes down.

Just for the record, I have everything fully backed up, both basic and full backups were run. Just in case I need to start over one more time. It is currently in maintenance mode.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Illori]

take a look at this:

Upgrading SMF

you do a new install and that will not have your old data. you need to upgrade.

[waratah]

Part of the issue is that it wouldn't upgrade, that was tried. I think at some point he changed the password to the database and it had to be reset before I started, I don't know if that had anything to do with it but just tossing that out there.

[waratah]

I'm going to restore it to the original 1.1.21 version again, adnd upload the upgrade files again. I'll report back with the error I ran into. I do believe the first time the upgrade was tried they were using 5.6.40 or 7.4.

[Kindred]

First.  Smf does not currently support php 8
Second,  you MUST use the same data....  that includes prefixes. Otherwise your data won't be there
Third, you must complete an upgrade to convert 1.1.x data to 2.0 x format.

Get 1.1.21 running correctly on 5.6 if you can....
Then
Upgrade using php 5.6 if you can-  then switch to 7.4

[waratah]

Thanks. Your post definitely helped me make some more progress.
So I ran the update using 5.6.40.
The update installed this time, however I can't take the site off maintenance mode. It just displays the canned "Okay faithful users...we're attempting to restore an older backup of the database...news will be posted once we're back!" message, but it no longer has the login fields to put my username and password in so i can log in and take it off maintenance mode. Just the message in plain text with white background, nothing else shows.

I tried it on every version of PHP just to see if one of them would let me in, didn't work on any of them.
So I currently have it left set to 7.4.21.

[waratah]

I went back to the old update one more time, did the upgrade but didn't turn on maintenance mode.
Looks like everything works perfect now.

Thanks so much!

[Kindred]

If maint mode was set to 2, you need to manually disable it in Settings.php by changing the setting to 0