I think I fixed it. Normally, I would give you instructions to do it yourself, but the exact steps were new for me too, so I had to try them out first.
phpMyAdmin doesn’t show an error if you try to re-enable Auto Increment. But if you click Preview SQL, and then copy it into the SQL tab, you’ll see this message.
#1062 - ALTER TABLE causes auto_increment resequencing, resulting in duplicate entry '1' for key 'PRIMARY'
So we can’t enable AUTO_INCREMENT because there is a record with ID 1. This is annoying to fix, but not impossible.
Working around this is simple: just find the record with ID 1 in the table, and give it another ID. I just gave it a very high value.
Then, you can retry the query, and it should work now.
With the value saved, you can change the ID of the record you just edited back to 1.
For good measure (I’m not sure if this is necessary), you could also update the AUTO_INCREMENT value to make sure it doesn’t overlap with existing values. To do so, check the table to find the record with the highest ID value, let’s say 12345.
Then, we need to set the auto_increment value to be one higher than the current maximum, by running this SQL query: