Erase & Install OS X, how to restore my original settings

Question

So my 12" PB G4 was having some issues the past couple of months. After reading through many posts on this board, and a couple of Apple articles, I decided to erase and install OS X again.
My system is 4 years old (came with Jaguar), I bought a copy of OS X Tiger two years ago and installed that on my system. I backup my system daily with an external hard drive (LaCie silver keeper software).
So the other day I did a full "erase & install" of OS X, to clear the system completely. I then dragged my "user" from my backup drive to my internal drive. Most everything is the same. My desktop folders, wallpaper etc... are back to normal.
BUT, my iTunes is a complete mess. I do not have any of my playlists, ratings, play counts. I had to update a lot of programs, such as iTunes, Quicktime, iLife apps. Because Quicktime was not updated, iTunes could not play video, so now none of my videos are in my iTunes player.
I thought EVERYTHING was backed up. What am i doing wrong? Have I gotten over my head, do I need to go to the Apple store and have a genius take care of this?

Answer 1

Did you try using Tiger's "Migration Assistant" application? I have mixed reactions suggesting this to you because it caused me a LOT of headaches when I upgraded from Panther to Tiger.
So as long as you keep the backup data intact (meaning, don't automatically throw it out and delete it once you've migrated the data), you can always start over again.
The thing is, not everything will be exactly the way it is unless the applications installed on your system match what was on your previous system. So before running any software updates, install a "bare bones" installation of Tiger onto your system.
In fact, if you want and have the time and patience (since you have a complete backup), completely ZERO OUT your hard drive and install a fresh copy of Tiger onto your system.
Then, startup and let the system go. Don't opt for Migration Assistant at startup. Do that later. When it goes through, do not do any automatic software updates.
Next, create a secondary account with administrator privileges. Restart.
When you turn on again, choose your secondary account, and run Migration Assistant. (I forgot to say, make sure the account name on the secondary account matches your backup data's account). Restart, then do any Software Updates.
Now that you've got everything in order, try out to see if all your files/setting/etc. were the way it used to be. Migration Assistant does everything for you, but it isn't without its faults. But more times than not, it works.
The only caveat here is that your external drive needs to be FireWire. So if your LaCie drive is USB 2.0, you'll have to clone and/or copy over the data from that drive onto a FireWire drive before you can use Migration Assistant.
Though some like to drag and drop, OS X is not built like Mac OS 9 where you could simply replace the new with the old by dragging and dropping and throwing things out. OS X has hidden files that you can't see, etc. Simply dragging and dropping a user account folder to replace the old won't work like it used to.