Getting CD Art Covers and Managing Genre Titles from 1 Pod to Another

Question

I just bought a 160-gig Pod. I have an 80-gig Pod with 20,000 songs on it and want to place those songs on my new Pod.
I have an external hard drive which contains all of my music folders and I am thinking of adding the songs to the new Pod (the process will take almost 3 days because my computer is just 500 MhZ and had limited memory and hard drive space, ergo the need to save the songs externally raher than in the i-Tunes library). But that can and would be done.
Here is my "dilemma:" Due to ignorance on my part the first year or so when I first began saving files/folders to this external drive in 2003, such things as CD art covers and the misplacement of genre titles are either missing or mismanaged on roughly 4,000 songs.
This might not be an issue with many folks, but for me, I am so anal that I want every song on the 160 Pod to look/sound as it does on my 80 (For anyone's information, I needed about 4-5 weeks to properly edit/prune the issues above when I initially transferred the songs on my hard drive last year to my 80-gig Pod last year--previously I had had a 60-gig Pod).
I have thought about connecting both Pods to my computer and then copying and pasting the CD covers that I need; I have also contemplated switching songs that had been mislabeled to their "proper" genres. Unfortunately, due to the already mentioned slowness of my hard drive and memory (I have just 384 RAM), it will most definitely take me an excruciatingly long period of time to accomplish this--my computer even freezes for almost a minute when any transfer of this sort is attempted. And to be sure, I do not want to go through the arduous process that I outlined above when I placed the songs from my external drive to the 80-gig Pod last year.
Failing the above process, then, and knowing the limitations of using the external drive to get what I want, is there a way that I can directly transfer what is in my 80-gig Pod to my 160? Would having both Pods in sync mode accomplish this? Would using my Pod as an external drive and copying files to someone else's computer do the trick? Or is there another method?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi Gregory Marchelos,
You should NOT connect both ipods at the same time. Especially with the addition of an ext. HDD. You will likely encounter errors even with a modern PC. That's a whole lotta load to put on 3 USBs, especially on an older PC.
you wrote:
"is there a way that I can directly transfer what is in my 80-gig Pod to my 160?"
As far as I know, there is no "ipod to ipod" transfer. The closest thing would be to get a 3rd party program (like yamipod) to get the songs from your 80G, transfer it to your PC, import it to itunes, then sync your 160G.
When I used yamipod, however, it did mess up a few of my artists' info (but just a few). So it wasn't a completely smooth transition.
You could try a 3rd party program, like I said. But the surest and safest way would be "arduous process" you mentioned above.
If you decide to do it manually, this time make sure whatever changes you make is saved in your ext. HDD so you don't have to do this again.