Installing Drupal

I can't figure out what is wrong here ...
I specified that the public file system path is sites/default/files and it created a directory /sites/default/files/sites/default/files
If I attempt to fix this by specifying /sites/default/files (I know this is wrong but I wanted to see what would happen) I get this Warning: mkdir(): Permission denied in drupal_mkdir() (line 2371 of /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/etcag/includes/file.inc).
I've never had a problem like this before and cannot figure what is wrong ... what parameter is affecting this?

I have installed drupal, and everything was working fine, when one day some issue occured in database (i think some data got corrupted). I restored a backed up database and site started working fine except for one issue.
What happens is, on some links(totally random), "access denied" error occurs and drupal prompts for login again. I assumed it to be related to session expiration, but I have checked the session settings in php.ini, everything looks fine.

Hi
I am trying to import a database to phpMyAdmin and I keep getting this error
#1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '?' at line 1

I know little about database files, I have Notepad++ but when I open the file it looks like a mess and I cant understand it. I have tried a mysql.gz file and a SQL file and I still get the same results.
Could someone point me in the right direction please

VB databases Conversion method into Oracle or drupal databases.

Hello there,

yesterday i got a drupal backend update message, update for the views module available.

So I did. and got the following errors:

---
Warning: include_once(/xxx/xxx/public_html/sites/all/modules/views/views_ui.module): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in drupal_load() (line 1105 of /xxx/xxx/public_html/includes/bootstrap.inc).
---

Website frontend still works fine, backend looked damaged.. i changed the backend theme and it looks oke again..

Hi,

I have followed the instructions on how to build and install the module GDAL-PHP. But Dupal doesn't recognize it. When I run the command "make test" in the build directory, it gives me this error :

Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/home/XXXXX/php5-gdal-0.1.3/modules/gdal.so' - /home/XXXXX/php5-gdal-0.1.3/modules/gdal.so: undefined symbol: _ZN17GDALDriverManager10MoveDriverEP10GDALDriveri in Unknown on line 0

I am running an Amazon EC2 server "m1.xlarge" with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.