I am trying to upload a backup SQL file through phpMyAdmin.

Create the empty db with the same db name as in my import file in phpMyAdmin then use the import function selected from within this empty db.

I get the following error message.

#1050 - Table '`db`.`t`' already exists 

Inside the import file each CREATE TABLE statement is suffixed by IF NOT EXISTS, so why is this being reported as an error?

    --
-- Database: `mbfour`
--

-- --------------------------------------------------------

--
-- Table structure for table `cars`
--

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `cars` (
  `car_id` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `type` varchar(200) NOT NULL,
  `status` varchar(20) NOT NULL,
  `capacity` varchar(5) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`car_id`),
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=5 ;

--
-- Dumping data for table `cars`
--

INSERT INTO `cars` (`car_id`, `type`, `status`, `capacity`) VALUES
(1, 'automatic', 'built', '4L'),
(2, 'automatic', 'in-production', '2L'),
(3, 'automatic', 'built', '2L'),
(4, 'automatic', 'in-production', '4L');
....
....

Does any magic happen?

After trying two times, I imported in the same way, and it works.