XAMPP messed up due to deleting something I shouldn't have

[tryin_to_learn]

I was cleaning up my hard drive yesterday and obviously deleted/uninstalled something that caused my whole XAMPP system to no longer work. I can't even get to the localhost menu to save my databases with phpMyAdmin and can't bring up any of my sites in htdocs. Entering http://127.0.0.1/ gets a page not found. I suspect what I did was - I thought I had an older version of Perl on my machine so I uninstalled perl, thinking it was that older version. However, when I go to my C drive, I still see both a perl folder and a perl5 folder that appear to have all the files in them. I also still have a perl folder in my xampp folder so I don't honestly know what I uninstalled.

Any suggestions about what to do? The version I'm running (or used to be running) is 1.6.8. I assume I would be able to uninstall and reinstall but the problem with that is that I don't know how to save my sql data. I've got the mysql > data folder with a folder for each of my databases but will those do me any good if I don't download the same version? I do have my htdocs data saved. Help?

[WilliL]

have a look to: (installation folder: c:/xampp)
c:/xampp/htdocs - all your webpages should be there
c:/xampp/mysql/data - all you databases are there in seperate folders

Make a backup of your data, uninstall xampp, install a new xampp and copy back your data.

[tryin_to_learn]

have a look to: (installation folder: c:/xampp)
c:/xampp/htdocs - all your webpages should be there
c:/xampp/mysql/data - all you databases are there in seperate folders

Make a backup of your data, uninstall xampp, install a new xampp and copy back your data.

So if I move the DB folders from mysql/data to the new version's mysql/data, that will automatically install the databases? I thought I read somewhere that that would only work if you were using the same version.

[WilliL]

no, it must be the same xampp version because mysql versions could be different

[tryin_to_learn]

no, it must be the same xampp version because mysql versions could be different

How do I download an older version? My version of XAMPP is 1.6.8

[Altrea]

You can get every released stable versions of XAMPP @sourceforge

btw: copy the XAMPP data folder works in many more cases then the exact same versions. And in some more cases MySQL has some functions to analyse and repair the data to make them run.
And if copy the data folder don't works, you can export your databases and import them back again to the new version.

[tryin_to_learn]

This worked great. I did make backups of htdocs and mysql/data but when I was uninstalling, I checked the boxes to keep those two folders and it worked like a charm. I was glad I had the backups just in case but I'm up and running again.

Thanks for the help.