Machine crash.. How to make sites work again – please help!

Hi everyone, this is not a matter of life or death as none of the sites I have made were ‘live’ but one of them was about to be!

I am working localhost, and my PC started misbehaving (random crashes etc) so I took the precaution of copying my ‘www’ directory to another drive.

(please note I did this because I thought it would simply be a case of re=setting up the database, and then viola!)

The machine crashed and I had to re-install. 🙁

I reinstalled wamp, and moved my old www backup into the C:wamp/www

I made a database in phpmyAdmin called the same as it was before. I changed user privilages to reflect my old username and password.

I then logged into the site http://localhost/olddirectory/wp-admin.

It asked me for the WordPress name etc (having never done this before I dont really know what ‘should’ happen here) and to reinstall wordpress.

I did all this, and now my theme is back to how it originally came! My days and days of work on it are gone! No posts, no pages, no theme changes…

As you can see folks, I’m fairly new to all this and dont really understand ‘why’ this doesn’t work, as to me the logic is sound. The theme was a child theme (and MY style.css is still there) the original header and page and loop etc etc etc must have been changed, so why do I now see the original version of the theme?

Thanks in advance all.

Art.