That almost always means the file you're importing is corrupted/damaged in some way.
It could be a result of any number of problems:
- file is not readable
- when the webserver uploads it and attempts to parse it, the content isn't readable as SQL code
- invalid syntax used in the imported file, including the use of obsolete SQL statements or comments
- bad line-endings due to mismatches in handling when transferring over repeated FTP connections
I suspect it's related to syntax problems between your old version of MySQL and the new one. The old one likely exported with "TYPE=MyISAM" tags on all the files, but MySQL 5 requires that to read "ENGINE=MyISAM".
I've sometimes seen conflicts with the use of '--' for comments in the file, and needed to change all those to '##' instead. That was a painful and tedious task, since a simple search/replace isn't easy unless your editor can limit the changes to only the cases where the '--' starts at the beginning of a new line, and not somewhere else *in* the actual data.




