Please help!!! How can I restore my music, pics and docs after replacing the hardrive?

Migration Assistant creates a new user with the migrated data. Go to  > Log Out, and log in the new user Migration Assistant created, so you will access to your data

toecutter2 wrote:

Last week I had to replace the harddrive on my 2008 Macbook when it crashed while attempting to upgrade the OS to 10.6.8. Compuzone replaced and installed a new hardrive.

First off the hard drive likley didn't need replacing if software was the cause of the crash, however bad sectors on the hard drive can also cause this and that is usually caused mostly by users moving a hard drive while it's operating. So as a result to cure all possibilities the drive is replaced especially on a 5 year old machine.

So all in all I say this was a right choice for your older machine to do, but your older drive is likely not dead, which is good thing.

Am I going to have to shell out another 200 bones for a data extraction from the old hard drive?

You can purchase a inexpensive SATA to USB adapter and connect the old drive, then when it mounts Finder > Get Info and at the bottom "Ignore Permissions on this volume" and drag and drop files to your hearts content.

IF the drive doesn't mount, try to repair in Disk Utiliy and if it still won't mount or says "can't repair" then you will have to install Data Rescue on the new machine and then connect another extenral drive (for output) and let Data Rescue $100 work to recover files (even some deleted ones will appear)

So it only get expensive if the drive is stubborn, if your OS X upgrade problem was only software/bad sector related then it shoud be rather easy to recover files.

If TM doesn't work, then you know your next move. 🙂

If you want to move files between accounts on the same machine, here's how.

Combine two+ Users Accounts on the same machine

toecutter2 wrote:

"The iPhoto Library is on a locked volume. Relaunch iPhoto when the volume has read/write accees or relaunch iPhoto with <option> key held down to choose another library."

When you hold the option/alt key down while launching iPhoto, you can choose other iPhoto Libraries on other volumes, however this is not what you want to do really.

Instead right or control click on the iPhoto Library and "show package contents" inside is a folder called "Originals" or "Masters" and inside contains your original photo's which you can drag and drop copy out to the new internal drive to the Desktop, and then "import" into the iPhoto which will place them into it's new iPhoto Libray on your internal boot drive.

When I attempt to open after drag/drop I get "You have Address Book 4.1.2."

Run Software Update, it might upgrade that AddressBook to the current version and thus you should be able to open the program.

However I doubt your old address book files are in the program itself, rather it's stored likely in the Users/Library folder someplace, I don't know exactly.

Apple was making AddressBook contact their servers despite not having a dot Mac account sometime ago and I thought that was incredibly rude, unnecessary and a piracy concern, so I haven't used it again.

So you will have to research where your old AddressBook file is located and how to extract it's contents. Sorry 😟