[support] Strange Drupal 7 problem, site wants to reinstall

[Richard Damon]

On 11/13/13, 1:48 AM, Roger wrote:
> I have a D7 site live and working.
> I copied the database and /sites folder and did a fresh install  of 
> D7.23 to my pc about a month ago.
> Using that on my Fedora 19 desktop version for development ideas, all 
> worked well and I was doing some dev work till late last night.
>
> Today I cannot open that Drupal  localhost/mydev .
> I have a localhost/sandbox site which does work. All file ownerships and 
> permissions are the same on sandbox and mydev.
> To use, localhost/mydev wants to do a fresh installation.
> /sites/default/settings.php is the same as it was last night but even 
> after chmod 777 settings.php, install reports that it does not exist.
> /sites/default/files is the same as last night but it reports that 
> /sites/default/files does not exist.
>
> I suspect that it may be an ownership problem where /files and settings 
> have to be owned by apache but have not had this issue on other test dev 
> sites, or maybe apache has calked it again but that does  not explain 
> the /sandbox site working.
>
> Can someone please advise me on what to look for and what permissions 
> should apply to appropriate files, perhaps even suggest why things may 
> have changed between last night and this afternoon.
>
> Most curious
> Thanks in advance
> Roger
Are there any other folders in the /sites directory besides default and all?

-- 
Richard Damon