Long story short, I'm part of a student organization, (or rather was over a year ago but has been dragged into this because I made the original template for their questionnaire years ago) who has been using Lime Survey with great satisfaction. However, the guy who ran the questionaire before me, had for some reason changed some mySQL setting on his web-page. Now whenever we try to acces the Lime Survey page we get the error message: "Can't connect to LimeSurvey database. Reason: Access denied for user 'xxxxx@'xxxxx' (using password: YES)".

The problem is that the survey-time has finished and we would like to collect the answers now, which means a clean installation is not a real possibility. Is there anything one can do?

As you can probably see I'm very much on a basic user level with everything concerning web-pages and programming, so I'm probably leaving out some important information, so just ask!

Hopefully you can help me, as I have no idea about what to do!

Well, from what I can see, you need to get in touch with the person who is responsible for the hosting of Limesurvey. Because either he changed the password, or, what concerns me more, has deleted the database...

So he has kinda got off the grid. Nobody can reach him. The last thing anybody heard was that he had changed the password to the mySQL and that it "fucked the survey up".

The good thing is that I have complete acces to the hosting site (it uses a free hosting service, and I know the password), though as I said, I'm not the most technical guy. I believe the MySQL database is still there, but I am a bit reluctant to go too much in to anything, as I would not like to make bad worse. I can however recoqnize several of the tables (I made the template for the survey back in the day), so it seems to be the right thing.

okay I "fixed" the problem. Apparently it worked just changing the MySQL password to the first one (which I found in the config.php file). However, the reason why the guy changed the MySQL password was because he wanted to fix another problem.

The survey website works as it should but if you go to */admin/admin.php to retreive the data I get the error message:
SELECT * FROM `lime_failed_login_attempts` WHERE ip='*';
MySQL server has gone away

Maybe this is a question for a MySQL forum and not here, but is this something you can help with?

OK, so it seems that there was something going on with the failed login attempts. Probably he tried too many times, got logged out, tried to resolve it directly in the database / source code and messed up the code.

I am not an expert on this. So I will not give any tips on how to fix this problem. But if you have access to the MySQL database, first thing I would do is to create a backup, to make sure, whatever you are doing from now on, the data is save.

Let's see, if someone else can help who has more knowledge about the programming side.