Zen Cart 1.5.4, PHP 5.6, Edit Orders, Zen Lightbox, EZ Populate, Image Handler 4, Moz## template

I'm looking for the easiest way to move my ZC 1.5.4 store currently on shared cPanel hosting over to a 1.5.7a install on a VPS/Virtual Private Server (Ubuntu 18 and PHP 7.4).

Would like to do a clean installation and only copy my products, customers, current orders, past order, and related info over using phpMyAdmin. Then customize the color scheme, look and feel, plug-ins, and other setup stuff on 1.5.7a manually. I did a similar update to 1.5.4 years ago and found what worked for me was to export just certain tables from the old database over to the new database. For example - categories, categories_description (etc), customers, customers_basket (etc), orders (etc), and products (etc).

In a test environment on VPS have gotten 1.5.7a installed and copied the selected tables over. From what I can tell the Storefront seems to be working correctly. But the Admin page only loads up until before it gets to Orders then gives an error:

PHP Fatal error: 1054:Unknown column 'sort_order' in 'order clause' :: SELECT orders_status_name, orders_status_id FROM orders_status WHERE language_id = 1 ORDER BY sort_order ASC, orders_status_id ASC ==> (as called by) /home/XXXXX/public_html/ADMINXXXXXX/includes/modules/dashboard_widgets/OrderStatusDashboardWidget.php on line 18 <== in /home/ADMINXXXXXX/public_html/includes/classes/db/mysql/query_factory.php on line 170.

This is not the full error just last few lines.

Assuming certain things have changed from 1.5.4 to 1.5.7a and wondering if it's going to be possible for me (as someone with very limited coding knowledge) to transfer store info over using this method again. Realize if I fix this one error there could be a hundred more that would also need to be fixed.

If there is a fix for this issue would like to try, also open to suggestions if there is a better way for me to do tackle this update.

Thanks, Ted