New computer, can't transfer music form old one??

[Jeff22]

as some of you know I just put a new computer together.

I'm having a problem with my music. I use iTunes but I don't have an iPod yet, that's in the future.

My problem is that I have a little over 3,000 songs or 20.6gb of music. I own all the cd's and I burnt them to my computer so that I wouldn't have to get a cd out I could just bring it up on my computer, or if I wanted to listen to a song I didn't have to dig through 300 cd's to find the song I wanted.

BUT, now I can't move my music from my old computer to my new one. I'm trying to use an external 80gb hard drive to save all the music to and then transfer it. I can't transfer it though. It gets about half way and then it starts getting write errors and saying that such and such file couldn't be moved and then I get write errors saying the data may have been lost.

All I want to do is take my mp3's from my cd collection and put it on my new computer.

It took me about 2 weeks to put it all on my first computer, and I thought there would be an easier way than starting over with my cd collection and saving all the cd's to my new computer.

any ideas on how to do this??

oh yeah, I'm not using a mac, I have windows XP

[Whir]

Is the external hard drive a USB? That is a problem I ran into with my USB external enclosure. It seems like XP doesn't really like prolonged use of the USB controllers. It's a known bug in the software/hardware relationship. Basically, I just started doing one folder at a time (although my folders were on the order of GB, not MB like a folder of MP3s). That way when it crapped it out, I would just restart at that folder.

[Jeff22]

Yeah it's USB. Maybe that's the problem. I'll try doing smaller amounts of music.

[Jeff22]

well, that didn't work. My external drive kept getting error messages, and then it started making some clicking sound and then it disappeared.

I tried to format it again and it says that it can't be formatted and still makes the clicking sound. I think it's done for. I thought it was having problems earlier but they seemed to go away and it was working fine. Now it just stopped working completely.

I'm going to send it back under warranty and get another one, hopefully that one will let me transfer my music.

[James T]

About 2 years ago I attempted to use an external USB IDE case for a 30GB hard drive and had nothing but grief (off Windows 2000) with it. I gave up.

Open the case, connect the drive and copy might be the best fall back.

[Jeff22]

yes, James I love that idea. I tried it. I have a 120gb SATA drive in my new computer, as well as an 80gb IDE.

I figured I'll just take the 80gb IDE drive and put it in my old computer. Worked great. Transferred all my music in just minutes. I was like "AWESOME!", but then I tried to put it in my new computer.

It wouldn't read the drive. When I was booting up in the new computer it said "non-system disk please remove and press any key". I was like "WHAT THE HELL" So then I took the drive out and re-booted and the computer started just fine.

I had to take the drive back down to my old computer, delete the partition, then bring it back up to my new computer and put it back in. Then I had to create and new partition and format it.

Any ideas on how to get around the "non-system disk" error?

I am using windows XP on both computers.

[Whir]

If you're getting that error, it's because the computer is trying to boot the system off the wrong hard drive. If that 80 was your main drive in the last computer, it's probably got a boot sector on there, which is not what you want.

So you have two 80GB, or one? Which is the boot drive in your new machine, the IDE, or the SATA?

[James T]

Non-system disk error suggests the BIOS found your 80GB first before the drive you already had set up with an OS in your old computer. Makes me think maybe its the master/slave jumpers or cable select or the like pushing the 80GB forward as the boot disk when its really just your data. I'd hate to be telling you how to suck eggs here.

[Jeff22]

Edited: Disregard what was here. I got really really confused.

Ok, it was the external drive that I installed all my music too and it went great until I tried to transfer the music from the external from my new computer's 80gb IDE.

The non-system disk error was the jumpers. On the OLD computer. I forgot to put the jumper on the slave. It was still set as master, so the old computer was getting the non-system disk error because it was seeing two master drives.

I put the jumper in, I'm downloading my music to the 80gb that I took out of the new computer and put back into the old computer.

When I have all my music on the internal 80gb, I am going to take it back out, change the jumper setting again, and hopefully it will recognize the drive with all the music on it. Hopefully.

Does that sound like it should work??

Do you think I really need the partition management program to make this work?? I have the drive as one big partition there aren't any seperate ones.

What if I put it back in my new computer as a slave drive instead of master?? Will that make any difference?

[samwichse]

Just use ranish partition manager turn off the active or boot flag or whatever on the 80gb drive and you're golden.

Sam

[Jeff22]

MAN!! That was easy! I can't believe I spent most of my day trying to transfer my music from one computer ot the other.

I just did it in 20 minutes. Thanks you guys are genious.

I took the 80gb out of my new computer, switched jumper to slave, installed in old computer, and transferred all my music.

Then I took the 80gb out of old computer, switched jumper back to master, re-insalled in new computer, updated my iTunes library and now I have all my music on my new computer.

That worked like a charm. Took me 5 hours to figure out something that should have taken 20 minutes.