Library folder deleted, need help restoring

Hello,

I have a G5 iMac running 10.4.7. The /Users/username/Library folder was accidentally moved to the Trash, now all of my settings (Internet, email, etc...) have obviously disappeared. It seems that OS X automatically recreated a Library folder when the original was moved to the Trash. I tried restoring the original Library folder by simply moving it from the Trash to Macintosh HD but I get an error the "The operation cannot be completed because you do not have sufficient privileges for some of the items." So I enabled the root user for the account and still had the same problem.

The next thing I did was I launched Terminal and did a "cp -pr Library /Users/username/" and it seemed that the files copied over, but when I launched Firefox or Thunderbird none of my original settings were restored.

Has anyone deleted their Library folder and restored it successfully? Am I missing a step or doing one incorrectly? If you could please provide any suggestions, it would be greatly appreciated! Thank you.

 

I've tried exactly that and got the same earlier error about not having the proper permissions. At this point I think it's simply easier to manually restore my settings individually for each program.