Another person with restoration errors

Recently, my friend and I moved our site from Fuitadnet to ZZhosting (long story). I backed up my database using the function in the CPanel, since the backup plugin didn’t seem to work for me. It gave me a whole lot of PHP fatal errors that I didn’t understand, and I ended up just using the one my host provides.

I don’t know very much about databases, or MySQL, or php, so I’m at a total loss. I managed to reconfigure my wp-config.php file to the new server information, and that led me to reinstallation, but… now what? The front page shows absolutely nothing (not a speck of html in sight), and the dashboard shows that I only have the initial “hello world” post. I have no idea where I’m supposed to go from here. How do I get the blog functional again? And more importantly, how can I restore all my old posts from the last two years? Or am I screwed because I couldn’t get the backup plugin to work?

If you can, please help. Thank you!

ETA: I’m contacting my old host to see if my site still exists on their servers (we only moved this week and our package there wasn’t due to expire until March) so hopefully if it’s absolutely necessary, I can get a backup through the wordpress plugin, but I still really need help. Chances are I won’t be able to access the old site and that it is gone forever.