I have new hard drive, should I use migration assistant before I install Snow Leopard or install Snow Leopard first?

Question

I just had a new hard drive installed after a hard drive failure.  I need to install Snow Leopard, Lion and VMware Fusion.  Should I use migration assistant to reinstall my old files and applications first or should I install the new Operating Systems first?  Some of the old files do have corrupt data and I will have to pick and choose what back-up files I re-install.

Answer 1

Pondini wrote:
memalyn wrote:
Some files were backed up on another external drive but not all.
How was that done? Drag & drop?  An app like CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper?
Initially files were backed up on the iMac with Time Machine.  I purchased a My Book external hard drive and after doing a full back up on it, I began doing all of my incremental back ups on it using Time Machine.  Sometime later, I purchased a Western Digital external hard drive that included back up software on it  called "WD Back-up" so I could use it to store all of my Music and Audiobooks on to keep my iMac and My Book free of those file types.  The WD Backup software allowed me to pick and choose what files I wanted to back-up.  I don't think I had been backing up Music and Audiobooks on the Mac anyway or maybe I was, I don't remember if I can selectively pick and choose files with Time Machine - I have not checked as I have not yet plugged it into my new hard drive.  Once The My Book drive became full with regular back ups, around June or so I had to switch over to the WD Back up drive.  I recall that I was very concerned that I could not do a full back up on the WD drive because if I did, I would have to reformat the drive and I did not want to do that, so I think I was able to selectively back up some additional files from my iMac but again, I do not know for sure since I have not looked at what is on the drive.  I do know that if I was able to back up additional files I had to do it with WD Back up and not Time Machine, if that matters.
I know that the files in the partitioned drive and files associated with VMware Fusion are damaged.  If I do a full restore, it will restore the VMware Fusion app and partioned drive
We need some clarification:
Do you mean there were 2 partitions on your internal HD? If so, how was the second one formatted?  Was it backed-up?
No, there was only one partitioned drive.  The way I understand it is the VMware Fusion software does the partitioning and the app resides on the Mac.  After that was done, I then installed the Windows software on the partitioned drive.  There is a critical file on the Mac under a Folder called Virtual Machines and in the Virtual Machines folder, the "Windows Bundle" or some such thing keeps locking each time the software crashes due to the problem files somewhere within the files in the VMware Fusion software that (I think resides) in the Windows environment that I cannot access.  The Virtual Machine file on the Mac gets backed up so the Windows Bundles files get backed up and that includes all the screen shots (essentially backups) of the Windows environment.  The Windows environment includes some of the apps and their data in Windows such as Quicken.  Theoretically, the partitioned drive does not get backed up but in reality if the screen shots do, some of the partitioned drive does - corrupt or not. If you have a Quicken file open and a drop down screen in Quicken frozen when the system crashes, that is what gets backed up and there is no way you can get back into Windows or Quicken.
               If I do a full restore, it will restore the VMware Fusion app
If you restore an OSX volume, yes, that will restore all apps, but that's not necessarily bad.  If necessary or desired, you can always delete or reinstall a suspect app.  That way, all your other apps will be ok.  For most users, reinstalling all apps is a considerable project.  See Transferring  Applications for an explanation.
Well, that is true.  To reinstall VMware Fusion, Windows and Quicken would much, much easier than all of the Mac software I have.  Plus, the VMware Fusion version I have is not compatible with Lion and my goal is to install Lion, so I will have to upgrade VMware Fusion no matter what.  Further, I'm so aggravated with the dual operating system, I've been looking at products to replace Quicken, so if anyone knows of a good home, small business and home rental financial product they can recommend, I'm all ears!
               If I do a full restore, it will restore . . . and partioned drive
If there are 2 partitons, a full restore only restores the OSX partition.  If a non-OSX partition was backed-up, it must be restored separately.
               Now that I've said I only have 1 partitioned drive, does that mean it will restore the partitioned drive?  I would prefer it did not.  It seems now that it would be much cleaner to restore the OSX drive.  Would I be able to do that?
So, depending on the exact circumstances, your best be may be to restore the most recent OSX partition, then restore/copy those files that were backed-up on another drive; reinstall VMware if necessary; restore the other partition.
So  . . . things may be a bit more complex than we though, but perhaps less dire.
More detail on the various partitions and backups should clarify things.