Q: Anyone else having problems with Step 6 and permissions to do this?

Technical info: MacBook Air 11 in, OS X 10.7.5

So I bought a new external hard drive (My Passport for Mac)...with the intention of making this my new TM backup destination.  Old TM was on one of two partitions on another external drive (another My Passport for Mac), my iphoto library on the second partition (you can understand why I wanted to separate the two).

Tried following the steps in the support article http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5096 - under the guidance of an AppleCare senior technician and when I got to Step 6

1. Make sure "Ignore ownership on this volume" at the bottom of the "Sharing & Permissions:" section is not checked.

I couldn't see how to do this anywhere (and neither could the technician).  So we skipped it.

I then got to Step 11. "Drag the folder "Backups.backupdb" on the current backup drive to the root level of the new backup drive" and I received some error about owner not having permission.

So then I was told to change the permissions of the TM backup file...and it sat on this little "progress" screen for hours...searched the internet for how long this would take and came across a community support post somewhat related https://discussions.apple.com/message/15009542#15009542 where one was advised NEVER to change permissions and NEVER to go into the time machine individual files...

Called AppleCare back and another senior technician assured me that it's perfectly safe to go into Time Machine individual files...just don't change them or cut them...copy them...he also suggested that I not try and transfer the old TM backup file into the new drive and simply start with a new backup...and then to SAVE my old database under a modified name and simply access the specific files if I need them...

Couple of SUGGESTIONS for Apple:

1) it seems that changing permissions takes a long time which isn't a back thing because I guess it's applying changes to every file etc...BUT it would be nice to have a little progress bar on each TM folder (you know, like the progress bars you see when you rip CD's to electronic format for each file it's working on)

2) I'd like to know why I'm having this problem in the first place.  When I bought this computer, I had Apple transfer the stuff from my PC to my MacBook Air.  I've never had to restore a backup from TM

3) About 3 weeks ago, there was an update notification from Apple so I started the process and left the computer (plugged in and on wifi).  When I came back there was some message saying it couldn't complete the upgrade and when I tried to reboot my computer it wouldn't.  Took it to an Authorized Apple fixer place who basically said it was probably because the internet connection was interrupted (Apple system should be more robust than this) and I think all they had to do was reinstall my operating system...not sure exactly how they did this...and if that is causing concerns with my existing permissions issue above.

Any thoughts?

Cindy