How To Copy User Folder/Application Folder To Fresh Drive

I have a friend's iMac G5 whose hard drive went south. Fortunately I was able to copy its contents onto an external firewire drive before it totally lost its data. I installed a new hard drive in the iMac and put on a fresh copy of Leopard and iLife '80 - using my friend's same name for the user folder. Migration Assistant won't see the folder as it is on a connected but not bootable drive. So I need to manually drag over her data but I am concerned about just how to do this in a way that won't put me (and her) in "permissions agony." What's the best way to do this? Her system was running Tiger 10.4.11.
Plus the same is the case for her old applications folder. How can I get all that including the files that go into various libraries. Migration assistant would be so wonderful as it handles all that stuff...any help with this part also?
Thanks in advance.
John
Message was edited by: JOHN PAGE

I was able to have a fairly successful conclusion to my dilemma. I had copied her information using Retrospect's Duplicate function and all her data was copied onto a firewire drive. This was done as her drive was going south before it totally deteriorated. I made a new administrative user with a slightly different user name (adding a 1 to her name) and copied all the user folder data over. Then I deleted the original user (and the 1 on her new user name) and was left with all her stuff in good shape with no permission problems that couldn't be taken care of with Disk Utility. Of course the Applications folder was one I didn't bother with because of how so many applications install things all over the place, preferences, application support folders, etc.; but, after a reinstall of most of her applications, things to seem to be working quite well. A few of her applications that I had no install for, I copied over successfully from her old application folder itself. Not bad.
I bought a Time Capsule for her use and am backing up that way for her...as well doing a Super Duper incremental back also onto the Time Capsule.
Thanks for your help.
John

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