Dreamweaver and PHP major problems

[Snooch]

I've got no idea what-so-ever of what I'm doing. I've agreed to help out with the site graphics-wise and whatnot, so I downloaded the whole site onto my computer. Now it's all php. In Dreamweaver, I open one of the pages and some code shows, but nothing shows in the wysiwyg view. So I figured I needed to try the whole test server and all that. That's where I get lost, BIG TIME. I set the local root folder to the folder in my documents that contains the html, sql, etc folders in it. Now I set the remote access to local, and its folder to the same as the local root. The testing server is PHP MySQL, local, the same folder as the other two, and the URL prefix is http://localhost.
Now when I try to load the database, it says 404 server not found. What do I put in the box that has the connection name, mysql server, user name, and password? I don't know what to do! Please, someone help, I've looked everywhere for 2 days straight.

[saeed42]

The first thing I would do is setup a small test site and see if I can connect to the db and then browse to it, this is just to make sure everything is setup correctly. Once you are happy with that download the db and transfer it to the local db and make sure everything is identical including username and password i.e. if table names are uppercase make sure they are uppercase on the local db as well, now see if you can browse to the local site.