User accounts REALLY messed up, my fault!

A couple weeks ago I successfully swapped out my old, dead hard drive and upgraded my RAM to 4 GB on my 7.1 aluminum iMac 20". Yay, right?

Well, not completely, no.

• See, lazy Mac owner that I am, before the HD fail, I messed up my Time Machine backups on my external hd. My last good backup was from March 2011. After that, TM was having backup failures that I had trouble diagnosing. After doing some digging, I found a piece of advice that said to 1) exclude user accounts from your backup 2) let TM backup 3) restore user accounts to TM and everything should be fine (or something to that effect, can't remember details, I've been through too much trauma losing my Mac baby for a week now). Well, I forgot to restore user accounts to TM before my HD died. I know, I know- stupid!

• Anyway, I did have a complete backup including user accounts from March in Time Machine, but Migration Assistant wouldn't let me to choose from which date I restore my info. User accounts file size was calculated to be 0 kb, and when I let it go to the next step, it just...restored it to the latest backup point, which did not include any user files- my pictures, my music, my movies, my documents. Even Software Update wouldn't work. So when I tried to copy those files over, the permissions were all messed up. I wiped my hd again and started over, it got so messy.

• After reinstalling Snow Leopard, I decided to to a manual restore, so I could restore my user account files from the March backup. So I manually went into TM and grabbed the files I wanted- iTunes Media, iPhoto pics, iLife apps, and iMovies, mainly. I don't think I did the hd/account naming right, because my permissions are realllllly messed up. I have an admin account and when I click on my son's account, which is a standard acct, I don't have perms to see his library or various other files ("you don't have permission..."). AND I've been getting various kernel panics- The Crash reports have titles like: security agent, window server, managed client, Safari, App Store, Mail, dmproxy, - a whopping 28 crash reports since Saturday evening. But there haven't been that many kernel panic shutdowns, just a handful in the last couple weeks.

•Yesterday I memtested my new RAM, it failed all over the place, and I reseated it and retested about 3 times since, all passed. My last crash reports are from last night, the last crash happened while I was downloading the latest iPhoto from the App Store.app and after that I trashed Safari & App Store, and got rid of their plists in the library file. No crashes since, but then again, I haven't taxed the system by asking it to do much. ALL of the crash reports have this in common:

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)

Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS

or at least the vast majority of them do. I can attach or paste anything you need me to if you need more info on these.

• My question:

If I wipe my hd and start all over again by restoring with Time Machine, I will end up with the same file hierarchy/user account permission problems I have now. Is there a better program to use to back up my iPhotos and iTunes media (without associating them with user permissions) so I can start over from scratch and have my Mackie back? Or is there a way to fix all this without starting over?



My head hurts.

Please help!

Laura