Problems upgrading

[RevTurk]

I'm having major headaches trying to upgrade my site. I have a live site running joomla 1.5 and virtuemart 1.1.9.

I want to make a new site locally using joomla 2.5 and virtuemart 2 but I can't get joomla 2.5 and 1.5 to work at the same time using the same wamp software. All I want out of the old 1.5 site is the virtuemart products pulled across exactly as they are, they have a lot of attributes and are quite complex so I don't want to start from scratch.

I have the 1.5 site on my local machine and the database is available in myphpadmin (it all unpacked as normal) I just can't run the site, it comes up blank. Is there any way for me to get the data out of that and import it into a fresh install of joomla 2.5 running virtuemart 2?

Or can I just backup my 1.1.9 virtuemart, install 1.1.9 on my local joomla 2.5 site and import the data and then upgrade it to 2?