Moving to a Windows Vista machine

[tbdbitl]

I am migrating to a Windows Vista machine. I have already added the MS pach for corruption, so I thought this would be easy, but now am not so sure.

I currently have a 30GB Photo iPod that is about 90% full - mostly music, but a few pictures, and a bunch of Podcasts. Some of the music was purchased from iTunes, the rest is a mix of downloads from websites, and CDs. I read a post here that made it sound as though all I needed to do was move the files to the new computer, keeping the same naming convention. This seemed to be easy enough until I found out a little Vista secret. On my old machine the music was primarily stored (as iTunes handled it) in a subdirectory called iTunes Music, which is in a directory tree that starts out with a folder named Documents and Settings. I tried to create this directory on my Vista machine, and it will not allow it. Vista keeps saying it will put all the files in a User directory, and will not allow the name. Poking around a bit, I found that there is already a folder named Documents and Settings, but it does not appear in the explorer or via the CMD prompt. The folder appears to be hidden, but does not have the Hidden attribute, but is marked Read only. It has no files in it.

So... What is the correct process to follow to move my files from one computer to another?

Thanks in advance.

[5billion]

well,
iTunes installs and puts a folder in 'Music' called iTunes music
when you move the folder over BEFORE you install iTunes,
iTunes will have all the cache and what not in that folder so you won't need to do much organizing, once it is installed.

[tbdbitl]

I am not having any success moving to Vista. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes, but it does not pick up my music. The Weird thing is that I can set the music location in the advanced tab of the preferences, but it is ignored in both Vista and XP. XP insists on using the c:\ drive, and points to the old files structure - just to be sure I renamed the old library, and now iTunes comes up with missing music. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[tbdbitl]

I am still having trouble moving to a new computer, but have had some success. I can't believe this is so hard.

I followed the instructions in the iPod 201 tutorial on moving to another hard drive, and it was apparently successful. I set the options as directed, and then ran the consolidation to move my files to a network supported drive. This took approximately 3 hours to move 24GB of data via wireless. After the consolidation completed, I exited iTunes, renamed the old directory, started iTunes, and began playing music. Everything seemed to be working - the router was showing activity, so all I can assume was that things are good.

This was only half the battle, as I need to get rid of the initial computer in favor of the new one. To do this, I ran two exports on the above machine, placing the two generated files to the same networked drive as the above.

I then got on the new machine, and began the import process. (I first pointed the iTunes on this machine to the new Network Drive.) Then I began the import process. It worked for about 3 minutes, and then announced that it was done, but that it couldn't find all of my music. In fact, it imported 183 songs, and missed about 3600. I can not see any rhyme or reason to what it picked - various artists, genres, playlists, sometimes a whole album, and other times just one track.

Does anyone have an idea on what I can do to correct this? Is there a better way to get the data into iTunes on the new computer?

Thanks in advance.