by Nobbie » 04. May 2017 11:05
Your subject (and error message) is quite confusing and i think its simply wrong. You say, "cannot connect to old database files". I dont believe that, because in that case WordPress would definately issue an error like "cannot connect database" or similar. As this does NOT happen, i think that your WordPress database is somehow corrupt, missing or manipulated or wrong data.
Am i right that this data is NOT from an older backup, but its simply the latest data after your installation has crashed? Of course it is very difficult to say, but i have some very bad experiences with WordPress, as my installation has been hacked three(!) times by a backdoor trojan. The visible effect finally was, that no contents had been displayed, i always received a blank page when calling my WordPress.
After a few days of investigation i found out, that WordPress has a huge(!) security leak in their plugins. I had installed some WordPress plugins, i never found out which of these were infected, but there must be at least on plugin, that installed a backdoor trojan on my server and finally destroyed the whole installation. Last not least I decided to say goodbye to WordPress, i recoded all my pages into plain HTML and PHP, and now everything runs fine.
If (and only if) you have been hacked also, there is no chance to recreate your old WordPress installation. Therefore i ask you for an older backup, do you have any backup prior to the last event (where PHP "broke" as you say)? Because i believe that your installation already is destroyed, we definately need a working release. Do you have an online version of your WordPress installation (Xampp should be used for local development only), where we can grab a copy? If not, i dont think i can help you, as i am pretty sure that your assumption about "cannot connect to old database" is simply wrong.