Restoring backup problems with new hard drive

Recently had to replace my hard drive (OS X Tiger 10.4.10). I had backed up iLife, iTunes and documents using the Backup utility (saving to external hard drive) and iDisk, so thought all would be well. My new hard drive has the updated OS (Leopard 10.5.5) and I cannot work out how to retrieve my stuff.
The Time Machine application obviously has no memory of my backup plans, and 'Backup' doesn't seem to exist, so I can't follow the restore instructions on that application. I can see that iLife and iTunes have been backed up on my external hard drive - I just can't see how to put the contents back. I have re-installed iLife and the iTunes application is ready and waiting.
My iDisk is completely empty - which means something is wrong or I completely misunderstood the point of it...
Any help gratefully received
Ross

Hi Lupe!
If you post the exact model number of the Seagate drive, I'll give the jumper setting a look to see it there is a limitation on setting to "slave." I wasn't aware anyone was doing that.
As near as I can tell, the basic problem is that the first-gen 733 QuickSilver does not have support for "large hard drives." That means that 128G is the maximum it can deal with. You can use the 160G drive, however, by using Disk Utility to create a partition of under 128G, say 125G, leaving the rest of the drive unformatted. Then it should work. Select the partition format as Mac Extended HFS+ Journaled.
Your G4 is older than the ones that this forum covers, thus the difference in hard drive capacities and also how hard drives are jumpered. You may want to make friends with folks in the forums for older G4s here:
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=113
Some of the same people haunt both forums so it's not a big deal if you decide to stay here. We're glad to have you either way!

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