How do I reinstall Prestashop over the top of an existing installation.

[gray]

How do I reinstall Prestashop over the top of an existing installation.

I have a corrupted installation. I have deleted all themes, so i am down to to the classic theme.

But the corruption is still there. So it must be somewhere in the core PS v1.7.8.2 files

So I want to reinstall a clean copy of v1.7.8.2 ontop of the corrupted v1.7.8.2

Is this feasible, and how do i do it ??!??. OK backup database, but what about config files.

[Ress]

I think the best thing would be to install a fresh prestashop, and migrate the data to it (orders, customers, etc.).

[Paul C]

A restart from zero might be the easiest on your sanity but it depends on what the "corruption" is! Can you get into the back office? If so you can check Advanced Parameters -> Information and that will identify any core files that are modified or if there are any other issues such as permissions being incorrect.

If you still can't get into the admin then what I would do is to overwrite just the admin folder and try to get in again.

Other folders you could try restoring from a clean install if the above doesn't work (with the goal of getting into the back office) would probably be:
 

bin
classes
controllers
src
tools
vendor

If these don't help you could also try (much less likely to be a problem and potentially could make things worse):

app
localization
var

Remember to make a backup of the app directory if you modify it as this contains your config (although I'm certain your config should not be overwritten by the files from a clean distribution and I'm sure you've taken a complete backup before starting this anyway!). Also in the var/cache directory remove the directories dev and prod if either or both exist. Check that there's nothing extra in the overrides folder either (you can delete it and replace it with the default one) and remove any non-default modules from the modules directory too. Sadly this whole process is orders of magnitude more difficult in 1.7 than it was in previous versions....

A tool I find useful (if you're using a Windows PC) is Winmerge. You can do a comparison between a clean PrestaShop download and your store to look for differences, although you need to know what should be different to make that effective, of course - most of the core files are fairly obvious though.

If after all of the above you still can't access the back office, then it might be an issue with the database as well... you could try running prestools, although it might not run either, depending on what the issue is. I assume the store was running but is now broken?

Best of luck!