Recently I was doing an import of a clients database from production which was so so in size. But I was installing it on a fresh install of WAMP Server. First it died because of upload_max_filesize inside the php.ini, that one is a simple one. After changing that to a size larger than the db import script PHPMYADMIN threw the #2006 MySQL server has gone away.

After scouring the web and the mysql site and found that if a packet is too large the mysql connection will be closed.

So to set the max size allowed for the packet in mysql change:

max_allowed_packet = 60M

By default it was set to 1M and 60 seemed to be plenty to do the trick.