Disaster Moving from mysql-4.1 to 5.0

[Fred Krogh]

I'm running Gentoo Linux and attempted to follow their instructions for an upgrade. The backup that was supposed to be done in this process failed. So what I have is

(1) The old directory contents for my database.
(2) A backup that is quite old.

When I try to access data using the contents from (1) I get

ERROR 1017 (HY000): Can't find file: './XXX/YYY.frm' (errno: 13)

When I try to restore using either the new or old mysqld/mysql I get

ERROR 1005 (HY000) at line 12: Can't create table 'XAA' (errno: 13)

Table XAA is almost empty so I can show what is at the start of the old backup.

################

-- MySQL dump 8.21
--
-- Host: localhost Database: mom
---------------------------------------------------------
-- Server version 3.23.49

--
-- Table structure for table 'XAA'
--

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS XAA;
CREATE TABLE XAA (
cat_char char(1) NOT NULL default '',
cat_index mediumint(9) NOT NULL default '0',
arith_type smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
UNIQUE KEY cat_char (cat_char,cat_index)
) TYPE=MyISAM;

/*!40000 ALTER TABLE XAA DISABLE KEYS */;

--
-- Dumping data for table 'XAA'
--


LOCK TABLES XAA WRITE;
INSERT INTO XAA VALUES ('I',75,4);

/*!40000 ALTER TABLE XAA ENABLE KEYS */;
UNLOCK TABLES;

##############

What I'm really hoping for is some way to recover my old .frm files, and my most recent data. But if that can't be done, just a way to recover from the old dump would be nice.

Any suggestions most welcome, Thanks
Fred