Shared files on a Mac

[MrBob]

Disclaimer: I'm not really certain of what I'm talking about, and it will be difficult to be brief here.
My G4 iBook running 10.5.8 suddenly died while on the road recently but before I left home I backed up to my WD hard drive. Death of the old unit included no visual display and not booting up so using firewire to migrate data was not happening
Recently I found a used MacBook running 10.6.8. I love it. What an improvement in the Intel based processor.
To recapture some of my old data I connected the WD hard drive to my MacBook and let it run. The WD established a new user on my MacBook and it looks like my music and photos and such were successfully downloaded. To access it, I need to log out of the current user account and log into the one established by the WD download.
Starting over in the new user account is a chance to do things a little differently so I'm cool with that.
My question, can I migrate my music and photos from the old user account downloaded from the WD hard drive to the new user account I set up when I registered my MacBook. I may want to pull more data later, but that's all I want for now.

[fierostetz]

its not too bad. if you get a copy of your itunes library on the external, you can gran the itunes music folder and just drag it into "new itunes" (itunes running on the new computer) and it'll import everything and update permissions, etc. This won't preserve playlists or play counts, however. If you want more than that, you'll have to get familiar with moving the folder to a new user account and modifying the permissions. If you don't know what I'm talking about (permissions) then I would definitely not pursue this.

Your first step for a lot of this should be apple's kbase (apple.com/support) as apple puts a lot of resources into their support structure. Here's a link to get you started http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4527

[MrBob]

Originally Posted by fierostetz

its not too bad. if you get a copy of your itunes library on the external, you can gran the itunes music folder and just drag it into "new itunes" (itunes running on the new computer) and it'll import everything and update permissions, etc. This won't preserve playlists or play counts, however. If you want more than that, you'll have to get familiar with moving the folder to a new user account and modifying the permissions. If you don't know what I'm talking about (permissions) then I would definitely not pursue this.

Your first step for a lot of this should be apple's kbase (apple.com/support) as apple puts a lot of resources into their support structure. Here's a link to get you started http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4527

Thanks for the link. I think I'll be able to figure things our from after I study the tutorials.
It looks like I'd connect the external hard drive and drag and drop the iTunes icon onto the iTunes icon in the new toolbar.
I have Pogue's book on my OS and using that I navigated to folders in the old HD but I don't know how to modify those permissions so I can access them from the new one.
Dropbox is on the new OS but not the old so I can't use that.

[MrBob]

Using the Apple instructions I downloaded my backed up iTunes folder from my external hard drive to new OS.
But, the music doesn't populate my new iTunes. When I pull up the music folder it displays a small red icon on the lower right of the folder and when I click on the folder the message I get tells me I don't have permission to see it. So, it's on my hard drive but I can't presently access it.
I'll go back to Pogue's manual looking for assistance because I'm stumped by this one.
Kind of interesting to resolve these problems, though.

EDIT: Figured it out using Pogue's book. I just added myself to the list of users for that file and gave myself Read/Write permission then dragged the formerly locked music file onto the iTunes icon on the tool bar. Twenty minutes later, a mirror image of my previous music library. Too cool.