Well I finally managed to figure out some of the problems I’ve been having and upgrade both MySQL and Drupal.

As you will notice, the site theme has changed as a result, and it’ll probably take me a while to get things straight.

The route that I took in the end was to use mysqldump to back up the entire database, upgrade to MySQL 5, and restore the database from the dump. This seemed to work fine and left me with a working database with my existing 4.7.0 install of Drupal.

I then upgraded Drupal in stages from 4.7.0 -> 4.7.6 -> 5.0 -> 5.1, running update.php at each stage. A bit laborious perhaps, but it worked without a hitch.

Thanks to D’Arcy Norman for a handy link, which put me on the right path.