[support] Problem with attached files when moving installation

[Elisabeth Atems]

Hello,

I've been asked by a colleague to help debug a problem that came up
when he moved a drupal installation from his personal desktop to a
larger server. I do system administration and consulting for his
research group but did not personally set up drupal, so I'm not too
familiar with it yet (though I'm slowly learning!). Anyway the problem
is: when drupal was running on the desktop, many pages were created by
users who had attached uploaded files to them. The installation was
tarred up and moved to the server and apache was turned off on the
desktop. Now the links within drupal to pages on the server have the
server hostname in them, but the links to attached files still have
the desktop's hostname, so when you click on them you are referred to
the desktop, which is no longer even running a web server.

It doesn't seem possible to manually edit these links in edit page.

Has anyone seen this before, and does anyone know of a way to correct
these links? The only thing I have tried is to edit $base_url in
sites/default/settings.php, which doesn't seem to be the answer.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Elisabeth