What will you learn from this book?

• Incorporate your existing handouts, worksheets, and other resources into Moodle courses
• Quick methods to make your Moodle courses engaging, attractive, and fun
• Fast ways to add multimedia to your course, or incorporate existing sounds and videos
• and more

Two ways to win

#1. Learn more about what the book has to offer, FILL OUT THIS FORM and tell me what 1 thing you plan on learning and using right after you finish reading the book. Or perhaps something you hope to learn and use right away after you finish the book. Please enter before Feb. 14th.

#2. Keep an eye out for @moodlerific ..I will be tweeting a question [related to the book] in the next week or so and the first to reply with the correct answer gets the copy! I will tweet a reminder the day I ask the question so everyone knows it’s the question for the contest!

That’s it! Again, head over to moodlenews.com to enter their contests as well.

Great news, Moodle 2.1 Beta is now available on Moodle.org for download! I just installed and tried restoring a 1.9.9+ course – it worked!

Helen Foster recently posted on Moodle.org asking for Moodlers to help out and send in their 1.9 courses for further testing. The restore 1.9 backups into Moodle 2.1 tracker item has been very busy and the status now says “closed”.

Moodle 2.1 is set to be released on July 1st. Please help out Moodle by testing 2.1 on the QA Moodle site. Learn how to help!

As I mentioned in my previous post I was stuck on the “migrating courses” page when I tried upgrading from Moodle 1.9.11 to 2.0.2. The two errors coming up were “Incorrect pool file content” and a number of stack trace errors:

I did some Googling and found 2 tracker items regarding these issues but it didn’t seem like it was during the upgrading process. I did find one discussion thread from a few months back about this issue that helped me troubleshoot.

First, I turned on as much debugging, error reporting or messages I could in the config.php file (not sure if there are other debugging settings to turn on?):

The debugging information didn’t help too much and I couldn’t find any error logs regarding this issue, so I continued to Google and research online. I checked out the /lib/filestorage/filestorage.php file because that was the file where the apparent first two errors were happening. I’m no expert at PHP so I wasn’t quite sure how to change or echo any further information when upgrading to see if it gave me anything more to work with.

I continued to read through the discussion thread I mentioned over and over and thought maybe it was corrupt file, too big of a course or file, etc. I looked in my moodledata folder [see path below] and found a file named with a random string of characters – which was the same string that was displayed in the “incorrect pool file content” error.

There were two other files with a long string of characters that were the same as two long strings of characters which were being displayed in the debugging information (these strings were successful operations). The two files weren’t big, the problem hash named file however was 500 MB. Was this the problem? I didn’t dare change anything via the moodledata folder.

I figured it was a file issue in one or more courses..I went into phpMyAdmin and started deleting courses, hoping a corrupt file would be removed and fix the issue. I had 3 imported courses from our production server that I restored on the 1.9 testing server to test “real life” courses in the upgrade process.

I deleted two of the four courses, same error.  Went back and deleted another course. Tried again, boom – worked. Since I had all of the debugging and information set to display it displayed all of the database stuff. Clicked Continue. It displayed tons of new settings, clicked Continue – MOODLE 2.0!

Success! Sort of..well..half way…I was able to upgrade from a 1.9.11 to 2.0.2 but I had to delete a few courses first. I believe I had to delete the courses that I imported from our production server (v 1.9.9). Only one course made it through, which I initially created on that install.

So it looks like the course migration is the issue – something with the files (doesn’t surprise me). I’m going to roll back to 1.9 and import different courses, create a few more courses and try again. I’ll post my results after I try it out again.

Related Posts

• Video – Converting Moodle Database from MyISAM to INNODB @mguhlin
• Second attempt at upgrading 1.9 to 2.0
• Starting the Journey to transition to Moodle 2.0 #moodle2

Check out his blog post for the videos : )

Another update – Part 2 of my “Second attempt at upgrading from 1.9 to 2.0” is coming soon. I actually had some success and was able to upgrade (with some tweaks).I’ve got the post written up about my experience. I just have to finalize and add some images. It will most likely be up tomorrow.

One major thing I did this time that I didn’t do last time was migrate my database from MyISAM to INNODB. I followed the directions from Miguel Guhlin (complete with screenshots). So, I really don’t know what this does but it sounds like this is necessary? However, I haven’t seen it documented in Moodle Docs (please provide a link if it’s there!).

I do know that in a fresh 2.0 install it does create the database with the “INNODB” type (you can view it in phpmyadmin, it will be in a column when viewing the database). Needless to say, I want to become more comfortable with what this is doing before I do anything on a production server. The good news is that following Miguel’s directions was easy.

Alright, here is the short run down of what I did:

1.) Exported my database via phpMyAdmin (saved on my desktop)

2.) Migrated my database from MyISAM to INNODB – DIRECTIONS

3.) Made a copy of my moodledata folder (used Fire FTP Firefox add-on for steps 2-7)

4.) Copied the config.php file from my current 1.9 install

5.) Renamed my web files Moodle folder to moodle1910.backup

6.) Uploaded a fresh copy of Moodle 2.0 (named the same as the old Moodle folder in step 5)

7.) Copied the config.php file into the new Moodle folder uploaded in step 6

8.) Visited my Moodle install, Clicked on Notifications

Result after clicking on Notifications

1.) Yippee, I’m doing it! -> screenshot 1

2.) Server checks, CHECK! Yay! -> screenshot 2

3.) Plugin Checks, eh..okay..a few non-standard ones but allows me to continue -> screenshot 3 | screenshot 4

4.) Then I ran into a problem [screenshot of where I'm stuck]. A progress bar (at 0%) is displayed for 3-7 seconds and then a red-highlighted box saying “Incorrect pool file content 17f65e7276dd4895c5fc8970e2aa834622a3696b.” is displayed. I’m also given the following error:

And that’s where I stand now. A weird thing happened as I was writing this  blog post – my computer froze up on me and I restarted. When I came back and restored my tabs in Firefox, the screen I was stuck on that had a progress bar at 0% now has a progress bar at 33.3%. Weird?

I haven’t fully looked into what is causing the “incorrect pool file content” or the other errors but here are a few links I quickly found:

• http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-27137
• http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=163074

I plan to further investigate about the above problem, it seems like there have been some discussion about the errors so I’m confident I’ll figure it out soon.

Minor issue/curious

The other thing I am wondering about is why there are standard (I thought) modules that say they are missing. I know Book is non-standard and I think hotpot, journal, lams and loan calculator are no longer in the core install but what about admin and admin_tree? Is this causing problems?

Like I said, this is my second attempt at upgrading and I haven’t spent too much time preparing or investigating the upgrade progress so I’m not too frustrated yet. I’ve been in the mode of waiting until more and more bugs get fixed and I keep checking the Moodle Tracker.

Originally our district was going to upgrade in the summer after 2.1 is released but we may push that back so we can implement a solid pilot group and create quality training resources.

I was upgrading on a CentOS VPS using cPanel, Fire FTP and phpMyAdmin. I’ll update this post with any updates on the error I received. Any insight into these errors would be greatly appreciated.