How to solve these errors after running update.php?

Question

I´ve updated my D6 site to Drupal 7. Even after running several times the update.php script, there are two errors still out there:

The following updates returned messages:

system module

Update #7061

Failed: DatabaseSchemaObjectExistsException: Table system_update_7061 already exists. in DatabaseSchema->createTable() (line 657 of /home/liga/public_html/includes/database/schema.inc).

votingapi module

Update #7201

Failed: DatabaseSchemaObjectDoesNotExistException: Cannot change the definition of field votingapi_vote.content_type: field doesn't exist. in DatabaseSchema_mysql->changeField() (line 454 of /home/liga/public_html/includes/database/mysql/schema.inc).

Note: I have Voting API module installed in D6, but I haven´t upgraded it yet.

This is what I´ve done: I´ve deactivated the module in D6, I´ve upgraded everything, and I haven´t updated the module nor try to use it, yet. Maybe the second error will go away when I do upgrade Voting Api to d7. but how about the first error?

Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

UPDATE: I´ve updated my site to the latest D7 version (7.22 - 2013-Apr-03), and Votingapi module to it´s latest stable version (7.x-2.11 - 2013-Mar-22), and the issues remain exactly the same.

Answer 1

My approach when this happens is to look at the table structure in a clean install of D6 to figure out what fields should be there, and compare that to the table structure in the current site. The issue is occurring because the update script has found something unexpected, so you need to figure out what that is.

In some cases, I've renamed the problematic table in the current database so I've got a copy, created a new table with the correct structure, and then copied the data from the backup table into the new table. I'm on a Mac, and Sequel Pro lets you do this via a handy GUI very easily.

In others, I've looked at the specific update script noted in the error to see what changes to the database it's trying to make - comparing that to the current version of the table can help identify why it's not allowing the update to occur.

This approach usually allows me to most database issues I encounter during upgrades.