Installing Drupal

I'm trying to set my the Private file system path to a folder above the site root, but I keep getting the message:

The directory /var/www/vhosts/mydomain/private exists but is not writable and could not be made writable

I think this is a server permission problem. Any pointers?

I intend to install the following drupal distribution

https://drupal.org/project/recruiter

I have a shared account at godaddy that can host multiple domains

I already have a domain that goes to http://www.rsquare.us

So I created a subfolder called "drupal" and under "drupal" I created "erecruiter"

When I navigated to that folder location after ftping distribution files to the path

I've downloaded Drupal 7 to my Windows Server 2012 and copied the files to the www folder of my WAMP directory. I then copied default.settings.php to settings.php and ensured that an empty drupal MySQL database was in place.

I started the installation and got to the database connection page. I entered the database host as
wamp/bin/apache/Apache2.4.4/bin/php.ini

How do you update Drupal Core on a local machine running on MAMP PRO?

I have just deleted all previously work on my local installation trying to update from 7.24 - 7.25 .... arghhhhh

We have been using multiple database connections in our settings file to help keep certain tables isolated from the default databases. These isolated tables include content that we don't want to overwrite when doing a database dump and restore to a production site.

I am trying to ascertain if we can separate out Webforms Module data this way. Does anyone know the answer or have experience?

I am trying to copy a site I made to my computer to try out a few upgrades. I transferred all the files and imported the database but I'm getting the below error...

"Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in C:\xampp\htdocs\myfiles\site\includes\bootstrap.inc on line 2239"

Line 2239 of bootstrap.inc...

function _drupal_error_handler($error_level, $message, $filename, $line, $context) {
require_once DRUPAL_ROOT . '/includes/errors.inc';
_drupal_error_handler_real($error_level, $message, $filename, $line, $context);}