Transfer Attempt To New Server Broke Everything

[solfan]

This has been going on for a month.

 

I have a friend that I'm trying to help him get a new template on his site, but the template he wants isn't available for a version of Prestashop that is so old.

 

He has PrestaShop™ 1.4.9.0 installed. 

 

Since I'm not bold enough to try and upgrade his production site without testing first, I backed up his MySQL DB, and all of the files on his server. I have a bunch of junk domains, so I pointed one to webspace on my server and was ready to do this.

 

I uploaded all of his files to my server. 

 

I uploaded all of these files to my server. I recreated his db on my server with same name, same user, same pw. I opened the SQL file (almost 300MB) and did a search/replace on his domain to my new one.

 

When I go to the site, it is just a blank page. I turn PHP error reporting on my (GoDaddy) VPS for this webspace. Still no errors. I can't get into admin either.

 

I decide, maybe the PHP version is too high. so I put something or other in the .htaccess file that is supposed to fix it. No luck.

 

Next, I decide "Maybe I should upgrade!".. So I download PS 1.6 and I upload all of the files to the server overwriting everything. When I try to run the upgrade.php file, I get the following: 

 

--------------------

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

<action result="fail" error="28"/>

-----------------------

 

So, I'm at a loss here as to what I can do do get this functioning on my server so that I can get his template installed, and know exactly what he's going to need to get his site upgraded to the latest version.

 

Can anyone please offer some advice as to what I should do?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

James

[solfan]

This is still a mystery. no help?