Laravel migration: "table already exists", but it has data and I cannot drop it

I am trying to do a migration with Laravel, but I get a message:

Illuminate\Database\QueryException : SQLSTATE[42S01]: Base table or view already exists: 1050 Table 'users' already exists (SQL: create table 'users'...

I researched this, and all suggestions say that I need to drop the table and re-run the migration.

However, my table has some dummy data and I don't want to re-type everything. How to get around this?

via Chebli Mohamed