The Pnebleu Blog

So, yesterday morning I clicked the upgrade button thinking everything would be fine and I’d be finished with the automatic update to WordPress 2.9 in a few minutes.  Nope!  The MySQL database I was using was less than version 4.1.2, which is required for the new WordPress version.  So the upgrade failed in the middle of the process.  I was unable to login to the administration screen and I was unable to upgrade the MySQL database directly.

Fortunately, I downloaded the backups beforehand, as you are supposed to do in the upgrade process.  I created a new 5.0 MySQL database, uploaded the backup (after a few tweaks to the SQL to make it work right), and reconfigured my WordPress installation on the hosting server.  After that it worked correctly.  I didn’t lose anything, nothing was corrupted, and I didn’t have to re-upload my files and photos for the links to work.

If you are going to have an upgrade failure, this is the one I would recommend.  It only took about 45 minutes to get everything working after it failed.