Possible to convert charsets? Help needed!

[0zz NoName]

The problem in short:
I've backed up my forum's DB (from MySQL 4.1.11) which mainly consisted of cyrillic data (usernames, topics, etc.), using default settings (I did not have any options on selecting CHARSET, and the database got converted in latin1_swedish_ci)..

So, after restoration on a different server, all data in cyrillic became unreadable. The hoster could not help: we tried to convert DB and tables using ALTER command, using set_charset when connecting to DB, it is not readable even in PHPMyAdmin.. We tried both: cp1251 and utf8...

I also tried everthing on local machine - no results..

The worst thing - I cannot read cyrillic data even in Notepad (or other relevant software) - tried to use miscellanious converters, but none can recognize cyrillic texts.. Although comments in backup are in cyrillic utf8 and can be read.

My question is: can the data be somehow restored? It is very important as I can lose all forum topics and messages and all registered users..

Besides, can the data be restaoured in MySQL 4.0 - where there is no SET CHARSET command?

Thank you very much for your replies!