Going from Powerbook to new iMac, need help transferring files

Old setup...
17" Powerbook, registered my iTunes on here, all media is on 2 TB external hard drive, all photos reside on Powerbook hard drive.

That's all I really care about transferring.

I got the iMac today and it walked me through a system where I hooked up a firewire between the two, but felt like I wasn't doing it right, so stopped. My fear is my iTunes will implode or something. I have two AppleTv's and two iPhones, so I can't afford to screw this up.

Want the iMac to control the iTunes, but still want all media on the external hard drive. I want the iMac hard drive to have all of the photos for iPhoto.

Can someone give me a 101, layman's way to do this?

BlueRevolution said:

You were doing it right. Format the iMac using its restore disks and go through the install process again, and let it run this time.

Click to expand...

That sounds like I'm wiping out all software that was preloaded - obviously, it must not. How do you do it?