Thread:Project:Support desk/Updating from 1.17 not working

My version 1.17 installation recently went into a state where the content of the wiki does not appear, although everythin else does, including menus and the code for the content can be viewed by selecting edit, even if the same content is not displayed when browsing the wiki normally. It is not clear to me what caused this. I don't think I did anything so I suspect an upgrade of some software on the server by the hosting company, the php version or something like that. I am trying to fix this and any help would be greatly appreciated.

It was suggested online that this situation might be amended by upgrading the wiki, but I am having problems with the update process. I have backed everything up and added a sha1 column to table revisions as suggested in the documentation. I copied my old LocalSettings.php to a directory with version 1.24. However, when I run the update script on the server, "php maintenance/update.php", the script exits right away without producing any output. The update process has not been completed successfully as I get a database error if I try to swap the old/new directories and open the new version.

I also tried using the web update. On the second page of the wizard, it seems like the system is supposed to detect my existing wiki, but nothing comes up and I cannot continue.

Because of the lack of error messages, I am unsure what to do. Any ideas?