Need to migrate, but already used setup assistant...did I totally screw up?

[mostlymac]

For a person who has used Mac since my family's Apple IIe, I can be pretty dumb, sometimes. So excuse my ignorance, please!

I want to move my documents, settings (I think), stickies, possibly some apps from my very old Macbook Pro running OS X.5.8 (is that Leopard? I get all those cats confused) to my brand new iMac (came with Lion).

When I ran setup assistant and got to migration assistant and told it to migrate everything over our wireless network (oops) it was telling me it would take over 12 hours. Meanwhile I'd shut down the internet access in the house (oops, again.) So I quit the process on both machines and restarted the iMac after talking to tech support who said I could use an ethernet cable.

Voila, setup assistant came back on and I set up my iMac. Not wanting to wait 4 hours in the middle of the set up process for 50 GB to migrate, however, I stupidly decided to wait until later to do the migration. (Also, I couldn't imagine what was taking up 50 GB on my MBP. Photos, maybe?) Now when I go to migrate, it wants me to make a new username. I read somewhere that doing so will give me an additional user. I don't want multiple users (old me and new me?) on my iMac. Just the one. (I know some people like this for troubleshooting purposes, but I just like things simple, so it just prompts me to log in as myself.)

My questions are:

1. Can I just go ahead and do the migration with a new username, and then somehow transfer all that data (from the MBP) to the admin account and then delete this second user? I know I can't just delete the user I created on the iMac with setup since that's the admin account.

2. Or, should I reboot from the Recovery HD and try to do setup again? Or will that just give me another user anyway and take a long long time?

3. Is there a way to migrate specific programs and not others? Some of them may be incompatible with Lion and I'm thinking maybe I should start with a clean slate and when I need those programs, download the latest versions. Most of them were free, after all. The ones I paid for need to be upgraded anyway. I'm still running Office 2004, for instance.

4. What gets migrated over in settings? All my gazillion stickies and dashboard widgets? Settings in individual programs like Firefox?

Any help would be much appreciated!

 

[mostlymac]

Oh, nevermind!

I called back Apple tech support and I am told this is just the way migration assistant works--it creates another account. From which I can then move stuff into the shared folder and delete if I want...in case anyone else is curious. Been waiting for this to happen for the past 4.5 hours, so can't say if it worked, but looks like something is happening, anyway.

 

[Mal]

Easiest thing to do is just make the transferred account an admin account and then delete the one you created at the beginning. There's no such thing as "the admin account", you just have to have at least one on the computer. Any account except the root account (which you would have to know about before it'd be an issue) can be deleted.

jW

 

[mostlymac]

I think you're right that using the new account would've been easier. I thought it seemed to have migrated funny, though. At first nothing would open at all, but after the support person had me boot in all kinds of modes it started working. So maybe it is fine. Is it possible that migrating Leopard will make it do funky Leopard things permanently, or if I change enough settings will it behave like Lion?

I spent all day coming up with tricky ways to make the settings from one account go into the other (mobileme etc) and just arranged everything beautifully in a Lion-like scheme on the new account. On the other hand, though my itunes music moved over, I have no playlists on the new account. (Even tried moving the library but afterward it told me I didn't have permission to open itunes anymore). I was thinking I'd have to wait for iCloud to fix that, if that's even a fix. So I hate to have wasted all that effort, but maybe I should go back to the migrated user?