necalli

I appreciate the help James, but perhaps I misused the terminology when I said localhost. What I meant was that it’s not been uploaded anywhere, this is basically a sandbox run on my own computer.

That aside, I tried to do what I could of your suggestions and found that my wp_options was corrupted – I have now repaired it and can access my Dashboard! Hurrah!

Unfortunately, having logged in, I have found that it is the default theme and none of my changes are present – where have they all gone? 🙁 Do I have to start from scratch? I did make a backup previously with a plugin, I will try to figure it out and use that.

[The following is for posterity and for any users who have the same issues as I did and so they do not have to suffer unnecessarily as I did ]

Using phpmyAdmin, I accessed my database (default is ‘wordpress’) and tried to open wp_options and found that it was corrupted. So, I just selected it (checkbox) and from the dropdown menu, selected ‘Repair table’ and voila!

Following up on my inability to run a second ‘fresh install’ of Instant WP running into the same error, it turns out that in my Task Manager (access via ctrl+alt+del > Start Task Manager) even after closing Instant WP, it was still running in the background in ‘Processes’. All I did was just select it (and I selected instances of Apache SQL or something too for good measure) and clicked ‘End Process’. I was then able to run and open my clean install of Instant WP.

Stay tuned to see if I get my website back!

One more thing I wanted to add/ask: I made a child theme and I did try to find the resulting index.php/HTML but it wasn’t in the child folder – where is it? If I copied the entire wp-contents it should be in there right?