Request for aid after hard drive crash

[John Ralls]

On Jan 17, 2013, at 2:57 AM, john henderson <avondalej at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 
> hallo
> My hard drive (mac intel snowleopard) crashed.  I have installed gnucash on the mac laptop.  how do I retrieve my accounts?  I can open the hard drive but not run it.Please note that i am totally dumb with regards computers, so your response needs to be in english and not computer language

Quit out of Gnucash if it's running.
Open a Finder window and navigate to the folder on the laptop's hard drive where you want to put the account files. If that folder has the same path* as the one holding the accounts on the old hard disk, Gnucash's history list will be correct when you're done.

Open a new Finder window and navigate to the folder on the old hard drive that has your account files in it. Drag those files to the new folder in the other Finder window.

Now navigate to your home folder on the old hard drive, then to Library, Applications Support. In the Finder window that's pointed at the laptop disk, navigate to the same place. (If your laptop is running Lion or Mountain Lion, Library doesn't show up in Finder, so you have to use the Go>Go To Folder... menu item and type in ~/Library, then click on Go). Drag the Gnucash folder  to the laptop window. You'll be asked if you want to replace the old one, select Replace.

Now start Gnucash. If the paths are the same, it will open your last-opened file and the history list will be valid. If not, it will complain that it couldn't find the last opened file and present you with gray window. In that case, select File>Open from the menu and navigate to your file in the file chooser.

* path: The path is the list of names of folders starting at the "root" leading to a file. For example, suppose that you have a file named MyAccount.gnucash in a folder named accounts in your home folder, and that your username is johnhenderson. The path to that file is /Users/johnhenderson/accounts/MyAccount.gnucash

If that's not close enough to plain english then I think a visit to the Genius Bar is in your future.

Regards,
John Ralls