Migrating from ibook (10.4.11) to new macbook with 10.6

Question

I'm writing this to hopefully be informative for someone else with similar problems. Have had an ibook for many years. Lots of documents; mostly MS word. Bought new macbook (white) and started it up. It asked about migrating but I decided to use it for a couple simple things first and migrate the info from the old machine later. So later came and I networked the 2 machines together (the new book ain't got no firwire!) to transfer the stuffs over likety split. Once all the updates have been done I start migration assistant and find that I can only choose to move the user account from the ibook to the macbook; IE, I cannot replace the new user that I created on the macbook a couple days ago. So I figure I want a new account anyway so as to be free of various issues. I'll simply copy the files from the old account to the new one and move on. But, after this is done I find that the new user does not have permission to work with the old files. These files belong to the old user. So I do some searching and find a program called batchmod. I try to use it to change permissions on all files in the documents folder. No dice, it doesn't change all permissions. So do some more searching and end up calling apple. They answer my call pretty quickly. They suggest that I make the old moved account the master admin account and delete the new one. I figure I'll try this so I log into the old account but find that many things are acting buggy. I can't change the desktop image. If I change dock preferences they only change for that session. As soon as I log out and back in I'm back to default. Some programs moved over from the old machine don't load or work correctly (Brother printer software for one). So I decide to give batchmod another try after some more reading. What I ended up doing was making a new group and putting the old and new accounts in the group. Then I changed permissions on all the docs in all their folders to allow this new group to have read and write access to the files. The tricky part was figuring out that batchmod would only do it's stuff one time per launch. For every new folder or change that I wanted to try I had to quite batchmod and start it again. The secret seems to be whether or not it asks you for a password. So now I've got access to the files in the new account and it's running sweet. My next task is figuring out how to make MS Word 2008 submit. I mean, Pages is pretty nice. If only it was suited to interfacing with other Word users then we'd have something.
Chmed

Answer 1

You would have saved yourself all of these issues if you would simply migrated everything on first boot. The key to moving stuff from one account to another is to follow these steps laid out by Király in
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11320719&#11320719