upgrade from 4.8c

[dreamhost]

My current site is running photopost vs. 4.8c (heavily modified postnuke bridged)(yeah I know... very old)
I have setup a new test site running vb/photpost/wordpress etc and have it configured exactly how I want it using the vs. 3.7.3 of photopost using vbulletin for registration etc.

Here's my problem that I just can't figure out.

In a perfect scenario I would like to bring the data over from my live website to my demo site to make sure it all works before messing with my live site.

As my live site is very old, and my demo site is all updated and installed, how do I go about doing this?

I'm guessing that a lot has changed in the db structure since 4.8c so simply 'hooking' to a copy of the old db for the new install is not going to work.

How would you go about doing this upgrade?

My plan is to transfer everything over to the test site, make sure all is perfect, then simply move all files over to the live site. (both sites and db's are on the same dedicated server)

any help here is greatly appreciated.

[Chuck S]

well you would need to replicate your old site files database etc. You would need to run install to properly install with vb and then upgrade to upgrade the database tables via the upgrade so you essentially need to do both.