[support] Recovering Drupal sites after disk failure coinciding with system upgrade - Advice?

[Max Pyziur]

Greetings,

We host several Drupal-oriented websites. Recently, we experienced a major
disk failure, causing us to move from an OS and technology stack that was
bleeding-edge in 2004, to a mainstream OS and technology stack currently.

The original OS and technology stack was:
Fedora Core 2.4
Apache 2.0.*
PostgreSQL 7.4.8
PHP 4.3.11
Drupal 6.*

Our new OS and stack is:
CentOs 5.6
Apache 2.2.*
PostgreSQL 8.1
PHP 5.1.6
No change to the Drupal 6.* variant.

Before disk failure we managed to gzip-tar the Drupal-related websites,
and run pg_dump against the respective website's Postgres database.

We've restored the Drupal-related websites to their same respective
directories (ones that the webserver recognizes.

We've restored one of the Drupal-related databases; some adjustments had
to first be made to the contents of one of "pg_dumps;" i.e. two lines had
to be modified from 'CREATE FUNCTION greatest ...' to 'CREATE OR REPLACE
FUNCTION "greatest" ....' in order for the Postgres database to be
restored.

However, the website returns Drupal's "Blue Screen of Death."  (It's a
nice shade of blue). The one that says, "Site off-line .... If you are the
maintainer of this site, please check your database settings in the
settings.php file and ensure that your hosting provider's database server
is running. ..."

The database server is running, since other (non-Drupal) databases are
fully accessible.

While the general plan is keep looking through log files, trying to find
clues to the cause, suggestions from the user community would be helpful,
especially who have encountered similar circumstances and problems.

Much thanks.

Max Pyziur
pyz at brama.com