> The characters look binary, so this might be a problem of conversion > latin1 -> utf8 or vice versa. > > Try dumping with: > > mysqldump --default-character-set=binary ... >/path/to/dumpfile > > And loading the dump with: > > mysql --default-character-set=binary ... >/path/to/dumpfile > > Let us know if that works. > > HTH, > thanks for all the suggestions - in the end i opted for rsyncing the datafiles for this db and for me this worked fine. Not the 'correct' way but one that worked OK at the time. thanks