Reacquiring Tiger Settings, etc. After a Clean Leopard Install?

Question

I had to run a clean install of Leopard. Old Bookmarks, Keychain, Library, etc. data is still on an external drive. I understand Migration Assistant functions only with other computers. Do I have to drag folders/documents one-by-one from the old Library and other folders? It's a huge task, and I fear I'm going to screw something up.

Answer 1

If you had to do a clean install because you were having problems, you're safest to copy as little as possible from your previous installation. Anything that's easy to re-create, do so. For example, your Keychain just contains passwords that you should already know, so it's easy to re-create. (Unless you've added some custom certificates or stuff like that.)
For Safari bookmarks, just copy Bookmarks.plist from ~/Library/Safari/ (where the '~' means "your user folder") in the old system to the new. Keychains, if you do want to copy them, are in ~/Library/Keychains/. If you use Mail, all those settings and mail will be in ~/Library/Mail/.
Things are actually fairly straightforward, as long as you don't try to do something like copy the entire ~/Library folder over, which you should not do. Don't try to copy any applications that required installation (as opposed to just dragging them into the Applications folder), just reinstall them. (You may be able to copy over the corresponding folder in ~/Library/Application Support/, but that won't work in all cases.)
Good luck!