Alrighty, kind of a long story:
I started dabbling with Wordpress about 4 months ago and since them I've learned just enough to get into big trouble. That's exactly what happened.
I was trying to edit the footer.php file for one of my "play" sites (Where I can experiment with Wordpress), and I was given a parse error regarding the T_String. That error locked me out (Whenever I tried to revert my changes, I was forced to the error screen again).
Stupid me then decided to try to wipe and reinstall Wordpress to start over, which ultimately was successful, but then I wanted to restore my website data. Problem is, I cleared out files manually in FTP too (Thinking it was all part of a clean reinstall. I have a backup from December, so I was going to restore that. I went through cPanel to phpMyAdmin to import the SQL backup. Upon import, I received error #1064 that there was invalid syntax in a file I was trying to import.
So then I figured I would clear out the SQL database and just start from scratch...but as if I hadn't made enough of a mess already, now I'm stuck. I don't have the knowledge to rebuild the database, and my backup of it won't import to save my sorry butt.
Here's my ultimate question: How do I do a clean wipe and restart the site from a backup? It's hosted as an addon domain with Host Gator, and I was sure not to touch any of my other sites' files, though after the SQL database delete, they all went down temporarily and remain slower than molasses. Any ideas?
Let me know if I can provide any more information, and thanks in advance for helping me learn something from my screw up.