Reinstalling wordpress

[noahgelman]

I was trying to resinstall wordpress. I wanted to start everything again from scratch. I cleared everything out and put in new clean wp files. I went to the install.php and got this message”

“You appear to have already installed WordPress. To reinstall please clear your old database tables first”.

I searched around for the answer of how to do that and I found this advice:

“If you just want a new WordPress install, then open the wp-config.php file and about 3/4 of the way down find the table prefix. It is probably set to wp_ Change that to wp1_ save the file and visit your blog address to set-up a new blog.”

And it totally worked. My question is why did that work? What happens to the old database information and where is the new information going? Is it just overwriting it? I ask this from an educational standpoint and not from a troubleshooting standpoint.

[TheDoc]

Simply by deleting the WordPress files on your server won’t delete the WordPress database. So when you tried to install WordPress again, it found the wp_ table in the database and was like, “Yo, you already have a WordPress table set up in your database, silly!”.

Using wp1_ creats a new table in the database – but won’t overwrite anything in the wp_ table.

[noahgelman]

Ok, so all the old table information is still there right? Is it accessible in anyway or is it in limbo till the database is deleted?

[jamygolden]

You could hook up your “new” wordpress install to that “old” database and it should be pretty much be the same as before (without custom additions, such as themes, plugins).

Besides that, it’s basically in limbo until it’s been deleted :p

[Bob]

I’m pretty sure you can access it via phpmyadmin, or whatever database tool your webhost uses, right?

[Author]

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