import custom fields

Doing a migration to Drupal 7 from another CMS and trying to import content and users. Can import basic fields just fine, but custom fields aren't working. Tried two ways: direct to MySql database and using drupal cmds.

(1) using sql insert

"INSERT INTO users (name, mail, uid, pass, ...) VALUES (blah, blah, blah, blah, ...), (...); " -- works great. able to login with old user id and password (pass is pre-hashed by Drupal routine).