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When restoring a DIFFERENT version of Joomla! than the one on your server you MUST delete everything, THEN restore the backup. This is actually written in our documentation. It has to do with the way Joomla! works.

Please note that you do NOT need to install Joomla! 2.5 to restore your Joomla! 2.5 site. You just need to remove all existing files and folders, upload the backup archive and Kickstart and then start the archive extraction and restoration.

Before doing that let's try something different: try using Kickstart on a local server. You can use XAMP, MAMP or WAMPserver to set up a local Apache-MySQL-PHP server with just a few clicks and no technical knowledge. Then just put kicsktart.php and the backup archive files in its root and run Kickstart, e.g. http://localhost/kickstart.php

If that fails too please check the following.

Do you have all backup archive parts? It's very likely that you have a multipart backup archive which consists of files with the same name and extensions .jpa, .j01, .j02 etc. You need all of these files to extract the backup. If any of these files is missing the extraction cannot proceed.

How did you download your backup archives? The best way is using FTP or FTPS in Binary Transfer Mode or SFTP (which is always using binary transfer mode). The same applies for uploads, so I guess you are already aware of this. But please do check again.

Did your backup archive transfer correctly or is it truncated? Please check the file size in bytes on both the server you backed up from, your local computer and the server you have uploaded the backup to. If any of these file sizes is different you have a truncated or corrupt-in-transfer backup archive.

OK, we can now perform post-mortem on this issue.

The key change you made was using "Ignore most errors". This option is designed for cases like yours, when one of the backed up files was corrupt OR shrank in size during the backup. In both cases the file size reported by the operating system of your server (and written into the archive's header block) and the total file size read from the disk did not match. This causes a corrupt file entry in the archive.

When selecting the Ignore Most Errors option you are telling Kickstart to try its best to skip this file and find the next one to extract. It's exactly what I used to do manually with this kind of archives, only five million times faster. That's why I wanted you to run Kickstart on your computer first. If all else failed I'd ask you for this inconspicuous debug.txt file written by Kickstart when extracting archives which would tell me which file was FUBAR and if all else failed would allow me to manually amputate it from the archive with a hex editor and lots of patience (there are some archive mending tricks I couldn't teach Kickstart because they require intuition).

As for the SQL error, it was a temporary fluke in the MySQL server. It somehow lost connection. That's not at all common. Having that happen on top of a very rare corrupt archive issue begs for buying a lottery ticket: you're seriously beating the odds! Anyway. By the time you retried this error condition was resolved and everything worked smoothly.

You're welcome!