replication is making me crazy.. (no replies)

so,

we have a couple of servers in the mess...

all running 5.0.58

A master, and 4 slaves...

The slaves are out of synch
we have been using skip counter to get around the problem, but really it only seems to make the problem worse..

The master DB is around 700GB large, and with the Replicate_Ignore_Table, on the slaves they are still around 300GB

So,

I have tried mysqldump -e -q --single-transaction --master-data=1 --ignore-table="ignored tables, its kind of a list"

> backup.sql

then mysql < backup.sql on the slave..

when I start,

start slave;

it runs for a bit, then errors out on a missing key and stops.

perhaps its just me, but I thought that I would have everything I need?

Could someone, give me a hint on this....

We are going to do the dump tonight without --single-transaction and let the database be locked for the dump...

I just wanna know, how to actually do this and be able to make a fully functional slave again..

any help, would be handy..