[SOLVED] 2.1.2 website move - versions.dat file not seen issues

The website for which I am a college sports photographer decided to move its webhosting to a popular superbowl advertiser. The gallery portion of the site was setup by me without much trouble on version 2.1.2 of gallery a few years ago.

The site owner backed up the MySQL database and the gallery data folder. But, he's not a tech type and I'm a Win32 multithreaded C++ developer, not a web guy.

But, using the FAQ, I tried to get the site resetup on the new host. I downloaded the full 2.1.2 install and put it on the new host, and the gallery data folder is there, as well as the restored MySQL database.

When I try to walk through the setup, I reach step 5, "Database Setup", and each time I get an error that the versions.dat file cannot be found. The versions.dat file is in the g2Data folder (named differently), and was copied directly from the old site.

I've set the access permissions to 777, and still no luck. Any thoughts?

Also, when the "moved" site is finally working, I've been happy with the 2.1.2 functionality for what I do. Is there any driving motivation to upgrade to 2.3?

Thanks in advance. I'm pulling my hair out over the versions.dat issue and I'm dying to post photos from the last few NCAA basketball games I photographed.

Bob

Only about 5 years worth of bug fixes and plugged security holes. Plus if you ever have to ask for help in this forum *everyone* is going to tell you to upgrade, and *nobody* is going to spend any time on your issue until you do. (Why should anyone waste time helping you with sometning that perhaps was fixed some years ago?)

Update2: Success

Thanks for the willingness to help folks. After I appeared to be hung in the "Installing the core module" step, I went to the hosting company's site management interface and turned on what I believe was error logging. Then I restarted the install process. This time, for whatever reason, the "Installing the core module" step worked without issue, and the install finished.

Inspecting the gallery, I discovered at the site "owner" had captured the database sometime after he captured the g2Data directory, and there were three missing albums from the g2Data directory. This wasn't hard to fix as I was able to add the directories/files to the g2Data directory. However, when I did that, I noticed the thumbnails remained broken. So....I used the management interface to ask the gallery to rebuild the thumbnails. Strangely, each time I did this, it would get through about 35-50 files and then I'd get a website error (seemed like a connection timeout). I quickly realized that if I just hit "refresh", it would get 35-50 files further each time. So....400 or so refreshes later.....

As the thumbnails were rebuilding, I encountered about 8 "corrupted" files that the thumbnail rebuild process errored on. Some turned out to be jpg files that were somehow "corrupted" and simply restoring a good copy of the jpg to the appropriate g2data directory fixed the problem. In two cases, somehow the name of the file in the g2Data directory and in the database had lost the .jpg extension. I fixed these by manually editing the database and the filename in the g2data directory.

So....at the moment, I appear to have a functioning 2.1.2 gallery.

Now...I just have to upgrade it to 2.3 so that Alec doesn't come hunting me down. GRIN

Bob