For the last 2 hours I've been trying to clone a Drupal website. I have a site on my PC (WAMP) and some server space on a dedicated server.

Now, I uploaded all the files without incident, next came the database. Usually I'll upload using phpMyAdmin but if there is a problem I'll upload using SSH.

So, I've got a file dump of the Database and I try to upload using phpMyAdmin and get server gone away error. So I try with SSH and get the same! I check the Database and everything is fine up to the System table which is missing but "still in use"?. So, I retry the whole database without the System table, all fine.

At this point I know the System table has a problem, but what causes that?!

After some SQL writing and testing the system table it turns out the 'schema_version' field has a -1 default value when it's a SMALLINT, but, SQL falls apart with that. If I change it to a '0' instead of a '-1' its all happy.

So now the 3 questions, why did it work with '-1' on WAMP version, why was it '-1' in the first place and will me changing to '0' cause a problem?

Anyone know the answers?