[GRASSLIST:9482] dem from vector files...help...

[geo356]

Hello,
I'm harris, i'm a student and I'm a new user of Grassgis 6.0. I started using Grass because of an essay and i have to finish it to get my degree...So i have to make a digital elevation model from some vector files.The vectors are containing elevation info and was digitized to arcmap.So i followed the following method :
I imported the ersi .shp,I had 4  shp files so i made  4 vector files.Then I  combined the 4 vector files to make them one. i used the v.patch command. Then i think that i used v.clean to snap the common vector lines but i not so sure if that was neccessary.was it? what other steps i must do? Then i tried to connect from another esri shp (that was containing all the vectors together from the begging) the dbf .i managed to connect the tables. My next step was to make vector to raster so i used v.to.rast. an my command was
 v.to.rast input=string [layer=1] output=string [use=att] [column=elevation (the column that contains elevation info iin my case.) is this correct? When i did that i finally used v.surf.contour to make my dem. So i'm waiting for hours for my dem to be done but it's procceding very slowly.
Is that the right way to combine vectors?Cause the first time i tried to make my dem throught that way i got a very bad dem...V.patch combines the dbf of each vector?i think that it isn't. 

That's all, i not so sure if i did the right steps in general and that's why i need your help anyway.If anyone could help me id be very grateful.
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