floundering newbie makes genius sleep.

please ignore! i put this in the wrong forum...

hi everyone,

i'm new here, and i've been searching the forums but can't seem to get exactly what i need-- that is, if i do indeed know what i need...

i have an ibook g4 crammed full of stuff and running slow. i backed up all my info on an external hard drive, then did an erase and reinstall with leopard. then went to the genius bar and got yawned at for 15 minutes while i asked for help about how to move my info back onto my nice clean computer.

basically, i started moving info from my external hd onto my internal hd, instead of into my home folder. i'm thinking i've completely screwed it up and should just do the erase/install again, but i have some questions:

1. should i erase my hard drive through disk utility, or through leopard's erase and install prompt?

2. how do you know what backed-up items on the ext hd aren't really needed (in order to save space)?

3. can i just drag and drop my backed-up home folder to my new home folder, or do i have to do each folder's contents one by one?

i'm sure these are veeeeery simplistic questions (as evidenced by the sleepy genius) but if someone could walk me through this like i'm a 5 year old, i would greatly appreciate it!

Well I've just done a very similar thing except I made a Carbon Copy of my old Machine and put it on an external drive which gave me multiple choices but these are not so appropriate for you so I won't go into them.

Firstly you're best off erasing your HD through the Setup DVDs as you can't, as far as I know, format and erase the disk that you are working on from Disk Utility. You can only erase your main HD if you have booted up from another external drive (like the Carbon Copy that I made) or if you boot up from the setup DVD (Hold down "C" as the machine boots up to boot from the CD Drive) But if you boot from the CD drive then you might as well do the erase from the setup DVD anyway.

Secondly reinstalling Leopard will put everything you need to run your machine bck where it should be so all you need to worry about are your applications and data.
I would personally do the reinstall and then drag and drop the files that I needed back into the appropriate folders from our external drive.
I'm not too sure about dragging and dropping the Home folder from one machine to another so I'd stick with the basics (personally)
At the end of the day you should be able to copy music and photos easily enough and move them over, same with emails as you just have to find where the inbox info is stored in you email client (if you use one) and replace one for the other and then really your only problem is your apps but you might have to put up with simply reinstalling them from scratch, which might not be a bad thing anyway.

Sounds to me like you need to seriously cut back on the info you have stored and get back to basics. Just keep you external drive with the original stuff on it for a while and you'll soon find that half of it is useless anyway!!!

Have fun

Can you use Migration Assistant to reinstate your stuff from the back up?

That was my other thought but I was guessing that he didn't use a time machine back up or something like that so Mirgration Assis probably wouldn't help too much, its still worth a try though!

thanks mac peeps! wombat, i did erase my hard disk from disk utility using the ex hard drive as my main disk, did the leopard/ilfe 08 install, and now i'm in the process of dragging info back over. my computer is running so well, i almost don't want to bring anything back.... almost...

i do wish i knew more about the contents of folders like ical and address book, seems like maybe i don't need everything in those folders? but, at least i'm dragging a lot less back.

thanks again!