Support

Firstly I just wanted to say that I have been pro user of admintools & back up for many years. I feel like I know both inside & out & use them in every Joomla site I create (100's).
I am not a newbie, VERY rarely ask for any help in the forums here, so hoping you can help me out with this issue.

Description of my issue:

I have the unfortunate problem of inheriting a Joomla 1.5.26 site that I have not created and is currently hosted in an area that I have no cPanel access.
All I have is Joomla Super Admin.

I need to backup and move to my local host, so that I can update a few things and then restore again to another host.
Long term plan is obviously to upgrade/migrate to J3.3.x and probably host on a siteground server. But initialy I just need to backup and move away from the current host

Anyway I installed Akeeba pro 3.4.3, left in default settings, backed up to Amazon S3, and then tried to restore to my local host, using the .jpa & kickstart.php.
The installer runs through to the last screen and then says I dont have a configuration.php file and that I should copy the displayed text and copy into the configuration.php file

I copied this & attached in a new configuration.php file, removed the installation folder, hit the clean up button via kickstart & then tried to visit the site.
The front page just shows an error - No configuration file found and no installation code available. Exiting...
& when you try to access the administrator sie, the URL tries to redirect to /installation/index.php

Fast forward quite a few hours & I Have tried all the below, but I alway end up at the same screen where it shows the issues with the configuration.php file

Adding in a configuration.php file from another 1.5.26 site and altering all the relevant information
Installing & uninstalling Akeeba back up pro.
Restoring (new back ups) to MAMP with different PHP settings.
Tried restoring to a live host - not MAMP.
Uninstalled all unnecessary plugins, components from site.
Uninstalled RS Firewall - Which I thought might have been causing problems.

This is a live working site at the moment is a fairly small site with only K2, Akeeba admin tools, Akeeba backup, JCE and a couple of Rocket theme components/modules installed.

But I am now lost as I feel as I have tried everything thats available to me.

Can you please advise anything different that I may have missed or provide any further help/assistance.

Thanks in Advance,
Andy

Its MAMP 3.0.3 on a MAC
I also tried uploading the backup to another live webhost though and got the same issues with the configuration.php file.

Happy to try the 777 idea on my localhost though.
Should I set the root directory to 777, before running through the kickstart & installer process?

Will give that a go now, thanks.

Just for information. I can use akeeba backup for an existing Joomla 1.5.26 website of my own, on my own webserver and restore this OK to my MAMP server, without any configuration.php problems, which is why I made the assumption that the backup taken from the live site is the problem somehow?

I just tried a clean new full backup in my local host.
Set the /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/mynewbackup folder to 777 And ran through the whole kickstart & installer process and get the same problem with configuration.php at the last hurdle.

I also tried this by extracting the files locally first too (not using kickstart)

As in last ticket I can do the same with another backup in the same MAMP local server and this all runs smoothly. That leads me to think its something to do with the site I'm backing up from?

Oh Yes :)
I don't have any cPanel Access to this site (& not likely to get it either), but I just installed eXtplorer and noticed that no configuration.php file is showing up inside the root.

Do you know of any work arounds that I could adopt to get this backup to work, given that we now know;

I have no cPAnel access to the current live site
configuration.php doesn't currently reside in the root

Thanks for your help
Andy