I've had very limited interraction with MySQL systems in the past but a situation has arisen in which my company has acquired a new client who has their existing systems running in MySQL.

I've been tasked with getting access to their existing data and pulling it out so we can import it into our system but I'm having some issues that I'm hoping someone here can point me to some answers for. There's no tech savvy people on staff at our new client and they don't want to inform their existing software service provider that they are transitioning to us just yet so we don't have anyone with enough knowledge to just push buttons in their existing system to extract the data. Ergo my job is to jump into the database and pull out the data in some (any) format that we can work with.

So far what I've been able to determine is that our new client is currently running a rather old version - 4.0.20. The output of uname -a is SCO_SV <nodename> 3.2 5.0.6 i386

If I attempt to run mysqldump I get an error:
#/D1/mysql/bin/mysqldump
dynamic linker: /D1/mysql/bin/mysqldump: invalid relocation type 192 at 0x434210

I don't know whether that means the binaries are buggered or whether I'm running them incorrectly (unix noob too)

I've tried downloading and installing MySQL workbench, but it tells me my version of mySQL is too old and it doesn't know how to communicate with it (no surprise there) [Connection using old (pre 4.1.1) authentication protocol refused]

I've tried downloading and installing archive versions of MySQL Administrator to run queries, but the query browser option in the tools menu is disabled.

I don't need to do anything fancy, I just want to extract the data in each of the tables into some standard (plain text, csv... anything) format that I can then start transforming and loading into our database.

Any thoughts or pointers/links/suggestions on where I should begin?

try HeidiSQL, i'm using it on my production server regularly and it's 4.1.20

Thanks - this tool looks perfect for what I need.

Much appreciated.