You had a couple of questions. Let me see...
Regarding the old values in your drop down menu: I couldn't begin to help you with that without looking at your code and seeing how you have your table(s) set up. If you post it and if it's not too much code, I may have time to look at it. Or someone else could also lend a hand too.
As foryour second question, okay, good, you have SSH access to your hosting server. I have been working with MySQL for several years and I have not once used phpMyAdmin or one of the other GUI products. That does not mean that I do not think they are good products, but what I mean to say is that you can accomplish just about everything via the MySQL monitor (via SSH or Telnet).
Okay, so if you want to load records from a file (rather than do it one record at a time), my choice is to use the LOAD DATA INFILE command. It's not difficutl to do, but I remember when I first used it a few years ago, I had to play around with the syntax. So if at first you do not succeed, just play with it some more.
The basic steps:
Read the link to the MySQL manual that I supplied to you so you know how to create your "file" to be read by MySQL.
Upload that file to a location on your web server.
Using SSH, connect to your MySQL server and select your db.
The general command is something as follows:
LOAD DATA INFILE "/path/to/my/file/file.txt" INTO table_name FIELDS TERMINATED BY "," ENCLOSED BY "\"" LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' (column1, column2, column3);
Now, before you try this, you NEED to look at the MySQL manual because you may be using different things to delimit your file. In my example above, I am using a comma to delimit my values.
This may seem like a bit of an effort to do, but if you have a lot of records to enter, this is the way to go. The other benefit of all of this is once you get it working, you will have your file "file.txt" (or whatever you're calling it) and if you want to load a second database with identical records, you can immediately do so. Something to give thoughts to in case you want to leave your hosting company.
You may want to install MySQL on your home computer and try doing all of this so you don't overwrite anything on your live db server or end up INSERTing records multiple times.