Thread:Project:Support desk/old mysql database resulting in Cannot contact the database server/reply (9)

No, the contents in the dump.sql file mainly are human readable text: A MySQL table definition and then all the rows from inside the according table. And that for every single table in the DB. Maybe you want to open the file with a text editor (which will react slowly due to the file size) and verify that after dumping the last table from Manual:Database_layout, it ends with something like "dump completed successfully" or something similar.

I believe you have two different problems at the moment:

1. that MediaWiki is not accessible. 2. that MySQL is not working correctly.

For the second problem: I see that you still can somehow access the MySQL server and data in it, but according to your error messages there is something wrong with the MySQL system databases. Anyway with broken system DB I would not really trust what the MySQL server is doing; maybe what it gives you is broken somehow. Before continuing with the DB server broken and given that MediaWiki needs the DB, I would try to fix that one first.

Btw. I found this thread http://serverfault.com/questions/527422/mysql-upgrade-is-failing-with-no-real-reason-given, where people discuss your problem. It has a number of solutions in it, the most common one being: You obviously need to supply the MySQL root user and its password when you run mysql_upgrade on the shell an the shell must be run with administrator privileges.