Font error after restore a 4.0Mysql database to 4.1 or 5.0 Mysql database!

[justbenice]

Hello
I got some very big problem with my forum and dont know what to do now :( I'v google around 2 days already and haven't found any solutions. I posting it here and hope anyone here have same problem so we can work it out.

I was running mysql 4.0 last years and my forum is UTF-8 charset. A whole forum is asian language , a few month ago i upgrade mysql to 4.1 and got some strange charset problem, it not a whole forum got problem, only some character ,i did not what to do so in the end i copy everything in /var/lib/mysql/databasename/ from 4.0Mysql to /var/lib/mysql/databasename/ 4.1Mysql, and it work great:D .Last week my forum got hacked and i have to restore my database, but a only one backup i have is from MySQL4.1 dump command in ssh which i backuped by a normall command : mysqldump abc > abc.sql . And a biggest problem happened, I got some strange character in my forum after restore that abc.sql to mysql 4.1 or 5.0 :( .
What should i do now ? Please help !

[eva2000]

vB version ? what PHP version? was the server hacked or only the forum software ?

You using PHP 5 with vB 3.5.x with config set to MySQLi with connection charset as UTF-8 ?

Can you post output for

mysqladmin -u root -p var ver

You should only be using mysqldump and restore if you are transferring from different major mysql versions such as 4.0.xx to 4.1.xx

How did you restore the database after getting hacked ? via mysql commandline

mysql -u root -p dbname < abc.sql

or

moving the actual data files into mysql data directory ?

Unfortunately, charsets confuse me too :o