Establishing a hypothesis

At this stage of the troubleshooting process, we will take all of the information that we have gathered and use it to establish an idea as to why the issue occurred and what can be done to resolve it.

To start, let's first review what we have learnt from the Data Gathering steps.

The hypothesis that we can formulate from all of these data points is as follows:

At some point, the data files for MariaDB, and more specifically the WordPress database, are inaccessible to the MariaDB service. It appears that when WordPress connects to the database, it cannot query the tables; thus, it believes that the application has not been installed. Since WordPress does not believe that the application has been installed, it presents an installation page.

We can formulate this hypothesis on the basis of the following key points of information:

Now that we have formed a hypothesis, we need to validate that this is true by attempting to resolve the issue. This brings us to the third stage of the troubleshooting process: Trial and Error.