New iMac, some issues...

[bananas13]

I just bought an iMac today and they helped me set up my account in the store. I upgraded from an early 2008 MacBook Pro, so I backed everything up to an external harddrive via Time Machine. I transferred my harddrive to my new iMac with Migration Assistant, and it made a whole new Admin account that I couldn't erase... and some of my old folders wouldn't open. Everything was really cluttered and unorganized (I went from Snow Leopard to Lion as well). I decided that I wanted to manually move everything instead, so I attempted to restore the iMac back to factory settings... but I'm unsure if I did it right...

I restarted the computer, then held down Command+R, then clicked on Disk Utility, then selected the harddrive and erased it. Did this wipe everything -- including the operating system? I'm now installing OS X Lion again, which is taking like 3 hours... =/

Did I do this right? Did I mess something up big time?

Also, my biggest issue was that I couldn't get Photoshop and Lightroom to open on the iMac... I kept getting an error message about an expired serial number. I deactivated Photoshop on my old MacBook, but it still didn't do anything. Do I just have to install Photoshop from scratch and re-enter my serial number?

Thanks in advance!

 

[talmy]

I've found that some programs don't migrate properly, probably due to "tentacles" they install in various locations. These programs need to be reinstalled manually.

I also have had permissions issues. These have always ended up being user ID mismatches between the old and new system. You can see the user id by right-clicking on the user in the list on the left in the "Users and Groups" preference pane. User IDs are added in numeric order when you create new accounts. Make sure that accounts are created in the same order. I always create an Administrator account first, and then user accounts. User IDs can be changed later, and the user IDs of existing files can be changed, but this can be a tricky task and generally needs to be done from the command line.