Mac os snow leopard reinstall panic!

Discussion in 'macOS' started by gregburbidge, May 28, 2011.

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  1. gregburbidge, May 28, 2011

    gregburbidge macrumors member

    Joined:
    Sep 2, 2009
    #1
    Oh no!

    Last night my brand new iMac stopped working when I tried to migrate a second user to it. I got a flashing circle/cross, a hard drive question mark and the apple logo. Trouble.

    When I talked to apple tech support this morning they said to reinstall the os and it would not erase my data. Did that, but now none of my users show up.

    In the hard drive, under users there is just a new dummy user from my reinstall, but the real users, and data, are sitting in a folder named users, with a long number after it. Applications and library and system look the same, with duplicate folders with long numbers after them.

    How do I get my users back! Can I just drag them (and library, and applications) into their new folders, or will that just mess things up?

    I'm panicking, as in the transfer over I lost my backup of the first mac I successfully migrated over. Don't want to do anying that would lose my iTunes etc.
     
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  2. ezramoore, May 28, 2011

    ezramoore macrumors 6502a

    Joined:
    Mar 20, 2006
    Location:
    Washington State
    #2
    Create 'new' users on the fresh reinstall to match the users whose data you want to migrate back in.

    Then open two finder windows (one in the 'new' user's home directory and the other in the same user's home directory from before the reinstall).

    Copy all of the files and folders from within the individual directories in the old folder to the 'new' user's folder.

    For example:

    Open Music in the old user.
    Select everything contained within the music folder.
    In your second Finder window open Music in the 'new' user's home folder.
    Drag everything from old user's folder to 'new' user's folder.

    Repeat for all of the other built in directories and any other data you would like to migrate.
     
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