Redmine

That's not the proper way for an upgrade. Re-load your pristine old data, point a fresh redmine installation to it a run RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate to migrate the database to the right version (it's not only about the schema). Follow the rest of the upgrade guide from there. Do you also have the contents of the files directory from the old install? If not, you have pretty much lost all attached files.

Thanks for the feedback, but I am still somewhat lost.

From the old corrupt server, I copied the db, files, email.yml and database.yml files/folders. The old server was running an older version of Redmine. I then downloaded a new vmware application (Bitnami Redmine) so it's up an running. Now I need to load my old data onto the new server.
Shall I merely replace on the new server the email.yml, and database.yml files then run rake command? I also have copied the files folder to the new server. But what about the rails files?

Not sure how much stuff BitNami changes, but I'll describe it the best I can wrt a stock install.

First, the easy stuff: the files directory and the config/email.yml, those you can just replace in the installation, the format and syntax of email.yml shouldn't have changed, and the files in files are referenced in the DB, so no worries there.

Now the DB, the schema of the DB is versioned (sort of at least), and these versions are migrations. Each migration is an atomic (or should be somewhat atomic at least) change that contains the needed information to go up one version, but also on how to roll back the changes to the DB. A migration is not necessarily only a case of schema update, it might also contain other stuff, e.g. some redmine command to put existing projects in a newly introduced tree. So much for theory. Now, what you have is a DB in an older version than redmine is, so you need to migrate your database up to the version your redmine installation expects. The already shipped database is of no use to you in that case, you will have to reload your whole DB as it was when you dumped it (in an empty DB!) and point your redmine to it by editing config/database.yml. At that point, it won't be usable because the reloaded DB has an old version, to migrate it up you will need to run RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate in your redmine directory, that will apply the migrations needed to get your DB up to the version the redmine installation expects. After that, see in the upgrade guide if there's any mention of clearing caches and stuff, restart whatever server serves redmine in bitnami, and you should be good to go.