title: My rails migrations won't run, and I can't deploy my rails app. How can I start over?
body: <p>At some point in my rails development I started making database changes (e.g. dropping or altering columns/tables) without using rails migrations. So now I get errors when I try to deploy my rails app from scratch.</p>
  
  <pre><code>blaine@blaine-laptop ~/tmp/rbjacolyte $ rake db:migrate
  (in /home/blaine/tmp/rbjacolyte)
  ==  AddHashToTrack: migrating =================================================
  -- add_column(:tracks, :hash, :string)
  rake aborted!
  An error has occurred, all later migrations canceled:
  
  Mysql::Error: Table 'jacolyte_dev_tmp.tracks' doesn't exist: ALTER TABLE `tracks` ADD `hash` varchar(255)
  
  (See full trace by running task with --trace)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can I sync my production and development environments with migrations after I've mucked it up by using raw SQL? I want to deploy my rails application without database errors, and I don't want to start from scratch.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>The data in the production and development environments match, but the migrations fail. I want a way to 'start from scratch.'</p>
  
  <p>Could I simply delete all of the migrations that I have, and then just start using migrations from now on?</p>