I'm a git newbie and recently inherited a non-functional project with had access to the local production version of the code. I made changes to the local, checked out branch to get it running again. I couldn't commit those changes because the remote GitHub repository was private, so I created a new repository and tried to check in the code to the new repository hoping to maintain the history of the project. Here's a bit of what I tried:

```
git remote set-url origin https://github.com/newrepo.git
git commit -m "initial commit to new github repo"
git push -u origin --all
git push --prune https://github.com/newrepo.git +refs/remotes/origin/*:refs/heads/* +refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*
git push --mirror https://github.com/newrepo.git

```

None of that worked - I wound up with only the readme in the new repository, perhaps because I didn't have read access to the original? I'm not sure. 

I've since gotten access to the original private repository and cloned it to a new, clean repo so that I can maintain the history of the project. I'd like to do a check in with the local copy of the code (with changes) to get everything caught up. What's the best way to do that? 

When I do a `git status` it no longer shows the previous list of changed files (because of the commit I assume). Should I do a `git commit -a` then push? I'm just not sure.