External hard drive gone wrong and copied everything to Imac HDD filling it completely

I have had my iMac backed up to an external hard drive for years and randomly the External hard drive is now not readable and it has seemed to copy everything to my imac hard drive filling it completely.
any ideas how to firstly fix the external drive without losing everything on there and second why it would have copied everything to the Imac?
I cant even do a restore from a back up as its all backed up to external drive and its saying its not readable.

If they're still in two folders (iTunes app and Music) on your external, can you not just copy those two back to the internal drive and expect it to work properly again? It's my understanding that music you wish to be active in iTunes must be on your internal drive.

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Transfer to External Hard drive gone wrong. Help!!!

I improperly transferred my Itunes, with all my music, to my external hard drive. Not knowing that I had to consolidate my library before hand, I just moved the Itunes application and my Music folder (which contained all of my current music plus a past library from another computer) to the hard drive. When it worked just the same as the Itunes on my internal, I deleted both my original Itunes application and music folder, only to find that after they were deleted, the external Itunes no longer worked as it had before. Now I have all my music and the Itunes application on my external hard drive, and I know there must be an easier way to put them back together then replacing each file one by one. Can someone please help a serious SNAFU? Thanks, at3.

If they're still in two folders (iTunes app and Music) on your external, can you not just copy those two back to the internal drive and expect it to work properly again? It's my understanding that music you wish to be active in iTunes must be on your internal drive.

How can I move photos from pictures to my Iomega external hard drive? I have copied all photos, however it won't allow me to paste them. The paste button is grayed out.

How can I move photos from pictures to my external hard drive? I have copied all photos, however it won't allow me to paste the photos. The paste button is grayed out.

Do you want to copy some pictures to the external drive, or do you want to move your whole iPhoto library? The latter will free up hard drive space on your start up disk; the procedure is explained here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2506
Note this is not the same as a Time Machine backup.
If on the other hand you want to copy some photos from one drive to another, you can just drag and drop them from one location to another. This is a true copy, the originals will remain intact.

I use only two channels, have plenty of memory in my hard disk, and external hard drive, no effects, and still having problems with Garage band. Giving messages as you have too many live channels

I'm frustrated, I am doing everything you recommend, I use only two channels, have plenty of memory in my hard disk, and external hard drive, no effects, and still having problems with Garage band. Giving messages as you ave too many live channels, the disk is slow prepare...can you help?

Quote from: Richard on 15-November-07, 20:33:05
tornado2003,
What you need to do is boot into Safe Mode. Then delete the VGA Drivers.
After that boot normally and install the latest nVidia ForceWare Drivers
Take Care,
Richard
i guess you missed that:
Quote from: tornado2003 on 15-November-07, 17:26:52
ive tryed booting xp in safe mode but it just freezes after it loads up a couple of needed files .
ive even formatted my hard drive and tryed installing a fresh xp on it but it just keeps locking up when it gets to the "starting windows setup" .(this is just after it loads all the drivers from the xp cd)

Can I use an external hard drive to download and store my iTunes library?

Can I use an external hard drive to download and store my iTunes library?

Yes - in most cases you can just copy your entire library (by default C:\Users\username\Music\iTunes) to your external drive, with the result being a iTunes folder in the root of that drive with a structure like this:
Then hold down SHIFT when you start iTunes, and when you see this prompt:
click on Choose Library..., navigate to the iTunes folder on your external drive, and click Open. See turingtest2's user tip on Make a split library portable for more information, including steps you may need to take to align your library structure before moving it to an external drive - this applies if you currently have some/all of the media in your library stored outside the standard iTunes Media folders.

HT1338 how to copy a external hard drive to other or copy songs from one to another

how to copy a external hard drive to other or copy songs from one to another

Don't understand exactly what you want to do. Can you restate your question?
You posted in the OS 10.3 forum instead of the MacBook Pro forum. To get answers to your question, next time post in the proper forum. See https://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa I'll request that Apple relocate your post.
Also you show iOS 6.1.4 on your profile. iOS 6.1.4 only runs on a iPhone, not a MacBook Pro.
 Cheers, Tom

My laptop and external hard drive both failed and got corrupter.

My laptop and external hard drive both failed and got corrupter. I've lost my quick time pro 7 and all my music, I still have my Ipod with the music on, How can I get it back on to Itunes and quick time pro back on to my PC? Many thanks.

Since your current editing workflow is based around Virtual Copies there are no actual files containing the edit data. Therefore, you'll need to use the 'Import from another catalog' option ( see File menu).

When my old PC died I had the tech guy place my iTunes library on an external hard drive. Just set up my new iMac

When my old PC died I had the tech guy place my iTunes library on an external hard drive. I just set up my iMac and I cannot get my library on the external hard drive to import to iTunes. I authorized my computer and had the "purchased" songs downloaded from iTunes directly, but I have 3,000+ songs from other sources that I cannot seem to get to. Help! What's the trick?!

maggiedoodle wrote:
When my old PC died I had the tech guy place my iTunes library on an external hard drive. I just set up my iMac and I cannot get my library on the external hard drive to import to iTunes.
Don't import anythiong.
Simply copy the entire /Music/iTunes/ folder from the external to /Music/ on the internal.
Launch iTunes.
That is all you need to do.

I made a bootable disc on an external hard drive, with Yosemite on it. I am running Snow Leopard on my iMac. How can I open the Yosemite disc from the desktop on my iMac? Does the external hard drive need to be connected to my iMac by firewire to

I made a bootable disc on an external hard drive, with Yosemite on it. I am running Snow Leopard on my iMac. How can I open the Yosemite disc from the desktop on my iMac? Does the external hard drive need to be connected to my iMac by firewire to do that?

kahjot wrote:
Snow Leopard's Startup Disk pref can’t see Yosemite volumes. So the only way to switch from Snow Leopard to Yosemite is to do what Niel mentioned. Doesn't matter whether it's connected by USB or Firewire, although performance via FW would be faster.
Are you saying that Yos/10.10, as a volume located in a mounted external drive won't appear as an option in Snow Leopard's Startup Disc, in Sys Prefs? I've never heard this one before. AFAIK any mounted volume, regardless of OS, should appear there. I would think that, if it appears in the Boot Picker/Startup Manager it would also appear and could be booted to from Snow's Startup Disk. I can't test this myself, since I don't have Yos. Is what you are saying documented somewhere?

I am trying to transfer my iTunes library via an external hard drive. It is copying the songs twice. What am I doing wrong???

I am trying to transfer my iTunes library to a new computer via external hard drive. When I open iTunes on my new Windows 7 computer, after I have followed the tutorial on the website, I get an additional promt to "scan fror media". All the songs are copying twice. I have uninstalled the program twice and tried again with the same result. What am I doing wrong?

Thank you for your response. I have done this...when I open the iTunes folder copied from my old computer, each song appears only once. When I open iTunes each song appears twice. Should I uninstall the iTunes folder from my old computer and reinstall it? It make no sense that I have 2 of everything in iTunes. Thank you for responding - I really appreciate it, as I don't want to have to delete each duplicate song

Itunes is on an external Hard drive, but it keeps copying my movies back. Why and what can I do to stop it?

I have a Mac mini purchased in 2010, i have recently purchased MacTV which is great and works well. Because I had so many movies and music I moved my iteunes to its own external hard drive. I keep getting the Start up disk full warning, which was why I moved both iphotos and itunes to external disks. but I still get the message, now and then. for instance last night it said I only had about 7gig left. I shut down the computer and thought I'll deal with that tomorrow, when I turned on computer today there was over 70gig available... I don't understand what is happening. I'm using iflicks, and I did discover that iflicks kept a copy of files on my hard drive and I've fixed that I think. This morning I discovered all my movies sitting in my music folder on my hard drive. i'm just getting very confused about what my computer is doing without my knowledge.

You will have to engage a split library which means you will have to start answering questions on this forum because you will need to learn a lot about how iTunes works in order not that have a big mess at the end of it all. It also won't be easy when the time comes to relocate it all to different drives.
You can go to advanced preferences and turn off organize media and copy to items to media folder when adding items to library. Next read about how to selectively consolidate items to the external drive.
Sept. 2010, Consolidate selected content - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2589812 and April 2014, https://discussions.apple.com/message/25414357
"...selected the new tracks directly in iTunes, Control-clicked on the selection, and saw that now you can consolidate selected items." - http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090919000326840
Remember that when you start iTunes without the external drive turned on iTunes will present you with a bunch of broken links. If you have automatic downloads enabled with iCloud you may have to turn that off to prevent iTunes from repopulating your drive trying to deal with those "missing" tracks.
If you add tracks in bunches to iTunes and want them to go to different media folders you will need to either add them by holding down the option key while dragging if the desired media folder is not the one set in preferences, or by changing the media folder in preferences. Changing media folder preferences only applies to new files added, not old ones.
Okay, I am going to stop typing because you might just reply to me, "Oh, okay, forget it," and I don't need the exercise.
What are the iTunes library files? - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1660
More on iTunes library files and what they do - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes#Media_management
What are all those iTunes files? - http://www.macworld.com/article/139974/2009/04/itunes_files.html
Where are my iTunes files located? - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1391

HT1751 How can I copy only music to an external hard drive from Itunes and not video?

I only have 32 GB worth of space and 54 GB worth of itunes. I only want to transfer the music on to a drive for back-up. Please help!

Drag and drop the music from your Itunes to your desktop - to the external hard drive.
- Works for me, Works for you.

Now that I saved everything to my LaCie external hard drive, do I need to erase my IMAC hard drive? My computer is still slow. :(

My computer is still slow after uninstalling Macbook pro and buying a LaCie external hard drive and saving everything to it. I repaired disk permissions. Am I supposed to erase original hard drive?
Thanks!

Not yet, get a second hard drive, or a second medium to backup your data. You never want there to be less than two copies of your data at anytime. If for some reason one fails, you'll always want a backup. Clone with Superduper or Carbon Copy Cloner. Note, if you have an early 2008 Mac, it is not PPC, but rather Intel. PPC indicates the chip is G3, G4, or G5. You can double check this by going to Apple menu and selecting About This Mac. Once you verified your Mac, I can ask a moderator to move this thread, so you don't have to crosspost.

How can I move my iTunes movies from my computer to an external hard drive? After I copy them to the drive, do I just delete them from my computer? How will I be able to watch them again?

Hi,
I have a MacBook Air (July 2013) with the latest Mavericks OS X. I also have the lastest version of iTunes.
My computer has very little memory left, so I wanted to free some up. When I looked, movies were taking up a considerable amount of space. I want to move them from my computer, but still be able to watch them if I want to later. I haven't purchased an external drive yet, because I didn't know what size to get. I also have a lot of Photoshop files that are taking up a lot of memory, so I might put some of those on too. Would you recommend a 1 TB one or bigger?
Can you take me through the exact process of moving my iTunes movies to the external drive? I understand where to find the files (My Name<Music<iTunes Media<Movies), but am stuck from there. Do I simply drag them to the external drive and then delete them? Will this delete them from my iTunes library? How will I go about watching them again? I assumed that I would just plug the external hard drive in, click in the movie and watch. Is it this simple? I only want to move my movies, otherwise I would follow tutorials for backing up the library. Once you back up the movies, can you delete them from your computer?
Thanks,
Molly

iTunes does not have provision for automatically storing one kind of media on a separate drive, so you have some basic decisions to make first. Do you want these movies to still appear in your iTunes library, or are you content with browsing filenames on a drive in Finder when you want to look for one? The second's the easiest thing because then you don't have to have an external drive permanently turned on and attached to your computer (wired or wireless). To do that you literelly only need to drag your movies folder to an archive drive and delete movies from iTunes. To watch them again you can add it back to iTunes while holding down the option key so the movie is used from its location on the external drive.
There's ways to move the movies to an external drive while keeping them in iTunes but the external drive iwll always have to be turned on and connected to the computer or you will see a bunch of broken link exclamation marks.
Realize what you are talking about is not "backup". Backup (which you should do) is putting a second or more copy of items on external drives for the day when your internal drive fails and everything on it is lost, inclduing all your home photos and perhaps things that have been pulled from the iTunes Store and can no longer be re-downloaded.

From External Hard Drive to Itunes and back...

Hello I have a external hard drive with 2 main folders Music 1 Music 2, each folder has about 6-8 sub-folders labeled with the genres am in to , and those sub-folders have the artist I believe correspond to that genres, to many artist with genres was a mess on my PC so I figured this was the easiest solution for me.
Still with me? Ok, Great Here is part one of my first question, How can I guide Itunes to my E.H.D music folders and telling it; here is my music, Fix it with albums and correct file name just don’t copy in to my Mac Hard Drive and take the 90 GB space your taking on my E.H.D. Second part do I need to prepare the music folders in any way, meaning can I leave it the way I have it set up or do I just put all the music, no labels just as is on main Folder and let Itunes label it and set it up the way I tell it to on ITunes.
Second question, since this has taken nearly a day and a half trying to find the answer, till I finally decided to ask. Should I just put all the music with out sub-folders on my E.H.D. on one main folder and transfer the 90 GB to my IMac H.D. and Itunes, correct everything on ITunes and let it label it the way ITunes, ipod, and Ipad, can read it with no problems of missing files or artwork. Then when that is done I can transfer it back to the E.H.D. and save it again, the ITunes way. If this is the best way then, I still need to figure out how to tell ITunes the music is here and perfectly labels and in its corresponding Sub-folders use it but dont take it to the IMac H.D(or something is getting back handed real quick). Hope this explains my frustration or am just over thinking it to much and making it harder for my self . again thanks for all the help.

Have a look at these 2 Videos...
http://macmost.com/moving-your-itunes-library.html
http://macmost.com/moving-your-itunes-media-to-an-external-drive.html

External hard drive gone wrong and copied everything to Imac HDD filling it completely

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