Going from Powerbook to new iMac, need help transferring files

[Advance The Man]

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]

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.

 

[Advance The Man]

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.

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

 

[BlueRevolution]

When you do a fresh install, it installs all of the preloaded software as well unless you specifically tell it not to. I don't use most of that stuff anyway, so I deselect it to save hard drive space.

I don't use my computer in Russian either, so I can get rid of a few language localizations.

 

[BobZune]

Some useful hints: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=435350&tstart=0

 

[Benguitar]

You should be able to just plug in the external HD and go to Migration Assistant and that should walk you through the transferring process. 🙂😉