Yet another Hard Drive consolidation question

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Lenrd

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Please choose the appropriate forum for this topic. Thank you. Okay - I've read posts till my eyes are bugging. Most of these things sound like they will work, but there is just enough difference in my pariticular situation that I thought perhaps I would ask fellow loungers for their advice before I screwed anything up

Specs are:
Windows XP SP2
Itunes 4.9
2 internal hard drives - 1 120gig (500 meg free) another 160 gig(15gig free)
My library is set to NOT organize.

I bought a 320 gig hard drive tongiht for the express purpose of moving my library onto one drive - I have my library across both hard drives.
I'm trying to think of the best way to consolidate all of this into one semi organized unit. When I have added music to iTunes, sometimes I have ripped it using the iTunes utlility (to where they are stored in the iTunes folder) OR will use other ripping utilities and then manualy import the folder.

Like everyone else, I don't want to lose play counts ratings, etc.

This is what I was considering - if anyone knows of an easier way that I am unable to see at this moment please let me know - I haven't even taken the new drive out of the box yet and won't until tomorrow anyway, as I fear this is going to take awhile.....

I DO have an almost empty 160 gig EXTERNAL drive that I can use for part of this.

OK here is what I was thinking.

1 Use Norton Ghost to make a back up of my D (slave) drive (the 160 gig for those of you still with me) onto the EXTERNAL drive. Norton will apparrently has an option to just make a direct copy of the drive.

2 THEN shut down, attach the NEW 320 gig in the slave position that was occupied by the 160 gig drive, and then boot up.

3 once booted - use Norton to copy the contents from the EXTERNAL drive onto the new 320 gig hard drive.

- I'm thinking that at this point, once copied, if I ran iTunes it would behave as normal, since the drive letter and file strucuture will "look" the same to it, even though it is the new drive. I did this once before when I swapped out a drive and it worked fine.

OK here is the dilemma (I think)

What I'd like to do is have all the music files on my C drive (the 120gig drive with 500meg open) as well as the ones on my D drive all put into a central library on the new slave drive....

And I know from what I read it can set it to consolidate and it will go from there.

BUT because I will already have 145 gig of space used, and it will copy everything, I will run out of space on this new drive before it can all be copied into the new library folder (I know this is just a temporary thing, and that I can delete files once copied - but what if I run out of space in the middle - my iTunes library is almost 200gig in size)


Ok if you've read this far, then my GOD thank you for bearing with me. One alternative I have considered is this

Copy the D drive to the EXteral drive and install the new drive in the D position

Then when Windows boots up - Reassign drive letters to where the External Drive (H) would now be D - and then also reassign the internal slave drive to something else for the time being.

Now - theoretically I could start up itunes with this set up and it should still run as before, since the External Drive will have the D letter assigned to it, shouldn't it?

And from here I could temporarily assign a NEW iTunes folder on the new internal Drive (J) and have it consolidate the library all into that drive.

BUT

Once I do that, and then Reassign the "proper" Drive Letter D to my 320 gig hard drive, how do I reset the drive letter change to where iTunes will recognize it? I can easily reassign drive letters in Windows, but not sure how to do this with iTunes to where it will "see" the consolidated library. Or should I just leave the reassigned letter on the slave drive "as is" so as to not screw up iTunes too much.

(brief aside - it'd be much easier if you could assign ratings directly to the MP3 file rather than through iTunes, as well as some way to save and import/export playlists - were these not considerations on my part I'd just do a fresh install of everything and redo the library from scratch - as it is I'm seeing to have to jump through hoops in order to keep iTunes pleased)


:: whew::

So, have I completely lost my mind in what I'm thinking? Is there another way this can be managed that I just can't see due to me only seeing trees in a forest? Anyone have similar situations they've already gone through like this one they could tell me about?


Anyone just want to wish me luck even?

Usually new computer stuff thrills me - this one just terrifies me for some reason.


I hope you are able to provide some insight - thank you for your time.
 

kevroc

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Apr 23, 2005
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If you ghost over the 160 to the 320 then swap them, your D is now the 320 with part of your library. Can't you just have itunes consolidate the remaining part of your library from C into D without "moving" the existing D library somewhere else which would cause you to run out of space?
 
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