How do I find my lost preferences! (after hard drive swap-out

Question

I replaced my bay 2/3 mirrored drives with larger drives, then copied over the data from one of the old drives from bay 4. My problem is I now have just a generic desktop, all my: dock and web preferences are missing, my copy of fetch wants a serial number. All my data is there but someone things are mixed up. Here's exactly what i did:
In bay 1 I have the original drive, which has all my applications, etc.
In Bays 2/3 I had two 500gb drives with my documents (mostly photos). This set up got too small so I bought 2 x 1 tb drives.
I placed the two new drives in bay 2/3 and one of the old 500gb drives in bay 4.
I turned on the computer and formated the 2 new drives as mirrored. I then dragged/copied of my documents from bay 4 to 2/3.
All works, all is there on the drives but I get a generic "dock", and all my preferences in firefox, etc. are missing, just generic copies of the software.
Also, when I tried to open "fetch" it asked me for my serial number, although other software, such as Lightroom open fine (although it does not automatically open to my Lightroom library).
i have tried restarting the computer several times, to no help. I've also tried logging out but this also does nothing. <<<<<<<<<<
I'm sure I made some mistakes doing this, like I didn't un-raid the old drives first.
Thanks, ron

Answer 1

Preferences are not located in the Documents folder. You need to copy a lot more stuff:
Folders You Can Move to Your new Mac
From the Home folder copy the contents of Documents, Movies, Music, Pictures, and Sites.
In your /Home/Library/ folder:
/Home/Library/Application Support/AddressBook (copy the whole folder)
/Home/Library/Application Support/iCal (copy the whole folder)
Also in /Home/Library/Application Support (copy whatever else you need including folders for any third-party applications)
/Home/Library/Keychains (copy the whole folder)
/Home/Library/Mail (copy the whole folder)
/Home/Library/Preferences/ (copy the whole folder)
/Home /Library/iTunes (copy the whole folder)
/Home /Library/Safari (copy the whole folder)
/Home /Library/Calendars (copy the whole folder)
If you want cookies:
/Home/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist
/Home/Library/Application Support/WebFoundation/HTTPCookies.plist
For Entourage users:
Entourage is in /Home/Documents/Microsoft User Data
Also in /Home/Library/Preferences/Microsoft
For FireFox:
/Home/Library/Applications Support/FireFox
/Home/Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox.plist
Credit goes Macjack for this information.
You may need to copy other folders in Applications Support for you applications.