Upgrade from 1.6.6 to 1.8.2

[wakewatcher]

I've been a happy camper with 1.6.6 (Bonde) and haven't messed with things since installing it way back when.  All of a sudden it broke when my host upgraded PHP to version 5.3. I spent my hour thinking about it and my hour looking at past posts and even extracted the tar.gz file on my pc for clues to see if it is possible to go from 1.6.6 directly to 1.8.2. (Or if not the fastest/safest way to do so.) I didn't see any warnings in upgrade.txt.  It also doesn't look like the upgrade follows the handbook upgrade section in the wiki. (http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php ... /Upgrading) In that I can't find reference about upgrade from x to y (e.g 1.2.2 to 1.2.3)
Anyway I haven't done anything fancy with my site but have lots of content I don't want lost.

My inclination is that I backup my source and database then ftp all the new stuff over the top of the old stuff then hit install/upgrade.php and cross my fingers.  Is that correct?

Thanks.

[RonnyK]

Correct,

upgrade, is taking backup of both files and database.

Then upload latest version files.

Run install/upgrade, although I let the application decide that for me, I just enter the backend by domain/admin and if an upgrade is required, then logging in to the backend will start the upgrade process

Ronny

[wakewatcher]

hmmmm.  Not having much (any luck) with this.  I've backed up everything (thank goodness) and copied over the files.  When I run install/upgrade.php.  It tells me that I can do a checksum test.  I don't have the checksum file so I just hit continue where upon. I get a blank screen and a 'done' in my FF status window (lower left hand corner of browser.)  Then when I copied the old stuff back over my content was missing until I restored my database which leads me to think that had the conversion worked my content might have gone missing.

This is a bit discouraging.  Is there a poor man's way to make 1.6.6 work with PHP 5.3?  I'm happy with the features of 1.6.6.

[wakewatcher]

Tried again with the same result.  This time rather than unzipping on my PC I uploaded the base.tar.gz to the server and extracted that.  (And I had the host admin CHOWN so I had full rights to overwrite.)  This time when asked if I wanted to use the checksum I pointed it to the checksum.dat and got a fistful of errors (something about "this is a directory") again if I skipped the  checksum step. It bails and doesn't got through the rest of the steps.  Any ideas?