Import large blog WordPress file posts into drafts

Hi,

We have a currently live WordPress site on WordPress 2.9.1.

We’re trying to import posts and comments from an old blog of ours (version 2.6.3) so we can get rid of the old blog.

We don’t want to use all of the posts from the old blog and we’d like to edt the others before they go live so we would like to import the posts as drafts.

In addition to this, the rss export file from the old blog is 23 MB (2000 posts), but the rss importer on the new blog says “Maximum size 2 MB”

How can I:

1. Get around the filesize limit to import the posts and comments
2. Import the posts into the drafts

I read a little about editing the RSS file, but did not understand it well enough to be sure I’d do it right (not to mentione that I’d have to cut it into at least 12 pieces…).

I am able to use phpmyadmin to export and import database files, but I’m not sure how I might merge the old blog database with the new one…

Thank you in advance for any info you might be able to share!

Michael