Comments for Lost Username and PW during upgrade

Lost Username and PW during upgrade

2009-04-26T21:37:47Z

During an ongoing upgrade from MT 3.x to MT 4.2, I got as far as the "Time to Upgrade!" screen. When I attempted to move forward though ("Begin Upgrade"), I got an "Invalid login" message every time I entered any variety of possible usernames and passwords.

I then clicked on the "Forgot your password?" link and was presented with a field to enter an email address. No matter what email address I enter (and I've only had about 5 over the last 15 years), I keep getting an error message that says "User not found." I even tried Melody and Nelson as a UN and PW.

All my .cgi scripts have permissions set to 755.

Has anyone ever run into this problem before and be willing and able to offer some assistance as to how to even back out of this limbo I'm stuck in?

Comment from Rob Kenny on 2009-04-28

2009-04-28T19:13:52Z

If you look in the database (mt_authors) to check what users are listed?

Comment from Mihai Bocsaru on 2009-04-30

2009-04-30T23:52:54Z

Dear Lexiphane,

This is an issue I've dealt with for some other movable type customers!

Get in touch from my Web site contact page and I will check your issue and advice what needs to be done.

http://www.pro-it-service.com/en/contact.html

The job is pretty technical.

Kind Regards,
Mihai Bocsaru

Comment from lexiphane on 2009-05-08

2009-05-08T16:08:44Z

I see a table when I click on mt_authors in my mySQL db with columns named Field, Type, Collation, Attributes, Null, etc. What specifically should I be looking for? There are >20 fields in the table.

Comment from Mike T on 2009-05-08

2009-05-08T18:19:16Z

If you are using phpMyAdmin, you're probably looking in the wrong place then. Click on the Browse tab near the top of the page when viewing mt_author.

Comment from lexiphane on 2009-05-08

2009-05-08T20:42:12Z

When I click on the browse tab when viewing "mt_author", I get the following result:

"MySQL returned an empty result set (i.e. zero rows). (Query took 0.0058 sec)

SQL query:
SELECT *
FROM `mt_author`
LIMIT 0 , 30 "

Comment from Mike T on 2009-05-08

2009-05-08T22:55:28Z

Then that means someone or something deleted all of the users from your database. What happened before this problem started?

Comment from lexiphane on 2009-05-08

2009-05-09T02:35:57Z

Nothing out of the ordinary happened to the site before this, other than I wanted to upgrade to MT 4.25 from the 3.x version I'd been using.

I followed the instructions provided on MT's website and wound up with this stall in the upgrade process where no username, PW, or email for PW retrieval was recognized by the program/system.

Do you think there's a way out of this? And thanks for your help.

Comment from lexiphane on 2009-07-02

2009-07-02T18:13:35Z

Mihai took a look at my DB and confirmed that almost all of the required MT tables are empty, indicating my blog was deleted or something bad happened.

I do have a backup file of the mysql db that I made before everything went south. If anyone can offer any guidance on how to restore the db and my site (even to point me in a helpful direction), I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

Comment from Mike T on 2009-07-02

2009-07-02T18:47:20Z

If it is a SQL file, you can either copy and paste the contents into the SQL command window of phpMyAdmin, or you can upload the file to your host, log in by SSH and run the following command:

mysql -u USERNAME -p (-h HOSTNAME if your database isn't on "localhost") DATABASENAME < backup.sql

Typically, that'd look like

mysql -u MyUserName -p MyMovableTypeDatabaseName < backup.sql