by Guillermo Madero.
J R,
About the server gone away, here you'll find some info:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/gone-away.html
Specifically:
You can also get these errors if you send a query to the server that is incorrect or too large. If mysqld receives a packet that is too large or out of order, it assumes that something has gone wrong with the client and closes the connection. If you need big queries (for example, if you are working with bigBLOBcolumns), you can increase the query limit by setting the server'smax_allowed_packetvariable, which has a default value of 1MB. You may also need to increase the maximum packet size on the client end. More information on setting the packet size is given in Section B.5.2.10, “Packet Too Large”.
So, to fix this you would need to increase the value of the max_allowed_packet directive:
Depending on your setup, open the my.ini or the my.cnf configuration file, search for the following line:
max_allowed_packet=somevalueMB
and increase the somevalue value (e.g. 16 or 32). Remember to restart the MySQL server.