Looking for help with an external hard drive....read on please...

I have all of my music on an external hard drive, and that's where my iTunes "points" to for all the songs in my library. Here is my question (and please be as literal as possible, even if you think it's obvious):
When I purchase new songs from iTunes Store, they don't go directly to the harddrive (at least I don't think so). So, what steps do I need to take to get any new songs from my iTunes library onto my external harddrive? Thanks in advance. I know it should be obvious, but I've been burned by countless "obvious" functions/actions in iTunes one too many times

RAIDing the two will destroy the data on the drive. I'm sure that's explained in the manual.

Similar Messages

  • Help with unreadable external hard drive

    I am having problems with an external hard drive and found your Email in yahoo answers.
    I have a 'MB' external hard drive with a Mac OS X 4 11. A few days ago I turned off the Mac at the back button, after the screen went dark, I unplugged the HD only to find the Mac came on again. The Mac must have been in sleep mode? Since this time the Mac will not recognise the HD.
    I tried another USB, making sure the preferences under finder is checked for all items and tried data recovery, PRAM reset, Disc Utility, which did see the drive (in gray) and it gave me this message; Error; underlying task reported failure on exit / 1 non HFS volume checked / 1 volume could not be repaired because of an error / unable to read FAT (input/output error).
    I am hoping I can still use this external HD or could there be bad news ahead? I have not yet tried this on another Mac. Please can anyone help or advise? Thank you.

    that was my backup!
    If you truly mean a backup then that means you still have the original files on your internal drive, or wherever. You just make another backup. If you mean it was an archive/overflow drive then that's not a backup (and you should start thinking about buying another HD to save both the files on your internal and external since either of those could fail without warning).
    So are you suggesting I go to a place/individual that does PC data retrieval? And does this mean I buy another external HD?
    I don't know much about file recovery on PCs. If this was a Mac drive then there would be a good chance you could either use Disk Utility on your Mac already to repair it, or perhaps a utility such as Diskwarrior ($100) to do the same. That repair could be done pretty much in-place. It's only when a drive is really seriously damaged, in particularly physically, that you need a second HD. Again, this is if you could do this on a Mac.
    There are supposedly Mac based recovery tools that can also recover FAT, but those would likely need a second drive and the results might not be pretty (files, everywhere, maybe without original file names).
    I'd find a buddy with a PC and see if they have something on there that can do it for a cup of coffee.

  • Help with using external hard drive to boot windows on PC

    Hi,
    I'm not sure if this is in the right place, so apologies in advance if not. I've looked around the internet for a good while now, and I haven't found anyone in my exact position.
    My PC's hard drive (running Windows 7) recently died; long story short, I am attempting to reinstall windows. The only other computer I have is this MacBook Pro, on which I have an .iso file of Windows 7. So I want to use my external hard drive (WD 500GB "MyBook") as a boot device so that I can install Windows onto my new internal hard drive.
    The problem I am having is that, well, nothing seems to be working. Every time I try to load the .iso onto my external hard drive and boot my PC with it, either a blank screen appears or it says "missing operating system".
    I have made sure that the BIOS is running the external hard drive as its boot priority.
    I have tried using Disk Utility to partition the external drive, then using 'Restore' to load the .iso onto the partition, to no avail.
    I have tried simply dropping the extracted .iso files onto the hard drive, this doesn't work.
    I have also tried changing the file system of the external hard drive using the 'Erase' feature (NTFS-3G (using an addon), FAT32, exFAT, all of the others), but I notice that whenever I use Restore after doing this, the file system seems to return to Mac OS Extended, which might be why it isn't booting up on my PC. Is there any way I can succesfully partition the external hard drive in a format that will allow Windows 7 to boot (such as NTFS?), and is Disk Utility even the right program to do this?
    If you want any more information from me, please let me know and I'll do my best to provide it - I'm not the most advanced mac user in the world, but I've spent days trying to fix this problem and nothing, no combination of anything, seems to work at all. So any help will be greatly appreciated!
    Thanks

    Here is a quick suggestion for you:
    Download Virtual Box (free PC Emulator for Mac) and install Windows 7 on your Mac (don't worry about activating it yet, as you don't need to keep it more than a few hours).  You can tell Virtual Box to use the ISO file as the DVD drive for your virtual Windows computer, so no need to burn a disk.
    Search Google for creating a bootable USB installer for Windows 7.  I found a link that gave good instructions on how to do this using DiskPart.
    Follow the instructions to make the bootable USB stick for installing Windows 7 using your virtual machine you created above.
    Use the USB stick to install Windows on your new PC.
    Remove the virtual Windows machine from your Mac.
    Remove Virtual Box from your Mac.
    I found a set of instructions and built an installable USB stick last night that worked great for installing Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) onto my older ThinkPad I had sitting at home.  The USB installer also installs in about half the time as a DVD install.  The only reason I have you create the virtual Windows PC is that all of the instructions for makeing the Windows install USB stick are written assuming that you already have access to a running Windows PC.  By doing this install, you have up to 3 days before you would need to activate it and you can build the installer USB stick and remove teh virtual computer long before that.

  • HELP with using external hard drive

    Can anyone please help? I have been using Windows based PCs for a majority of my life. I recently purchased a Macbook. I have thousands of songs saved on a Maxtor external hard drive. I recently connected the HD to my Macbook and was able to successfully copy over all of the photos I have saved and only few of the audio files but not all. I checked the audio files are saved in itunes format. Why can I not copy all of my music over? Please help! When I connect HD to PC I see the missing files that cannot been seen when I connect my HD to my Macbook. Bizare, don't you think?

    Any chance that the files not showing up on the Mac have file names starting with a period (.)?
    Patrick

  • Need help with networking external hard drive

    Hi,
    I am working on a corporate network and I have a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition external hard drive attached to a Mac OSX 10.4. i have other Macs connecting through the network to this Mac and accessing the external hard drive and it works just fine for that.
    What I need help with is the fact that I also have several PCs on the same network (all XP), that need to connect to the hard drive and access the files. I've been able to connect to the Mac using the XP by accessing the IP address. I also set the Mac up with password credentials so that I had to log in to the Mac to access the files. But when I try to access the Mac, it only shows the main computer drive as the only available share and no external drive.
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    For an external hard disk drive or other (different) system shared
    storage devices to work, they probably should be formatted in a
    format seen by both operating systems.
    If the WD unit is not seen by Windows computers on your network,
    the WD may have been formatted in HFS+ for the Macintosh. That
    is OK unless you need a Windows computer to access the same.
    The Macintosh can see and use a standard Windows disc format;
    so the external drive may need to be reformatted away from HFS+
    if that is really what is going on (and archive any data on the suspect
    drive elsewhere, since it will be lost to reformatting overwrites)
    and then both Mac OS X and Windows should see the files on there.
    And Macs set up to run Windows may also see the non-Mac format;
    without having to re-boot via BootCamp, if that option is in use.
    As to the other question(s) I really have no idea at this point in time.
    And since that may be the rub, hopefully someone will follow up here.
    Good luck & happy computing!

  • Need Help with my External Hard Drive

    Hey Guys, so i bought a 2TB WD Passport for Mac about 2 months ago...It worked great, but then i dropped it by accident. It was connected to my Mac at the time, so when it fell it disconnected from the cable and fell. Now when i connect it, the external hard drive powers on. I can feel it on like always, the little light turns on as well, its flickering as if it was in use. The thing is that it wont show up ANYWHERE on my mac. Any help?

    LittleGuy16 wrote:
    got dropped........It was connected to my Mac at the time
    HEAD CRASH  ,    your HD is extremely likely kaput
    hard drive moving parts
    Some of the common reasons for hard drives to fail:
    Infant mortality (due to mfg. defect / build tolerances)
    Bad parking   (head impact)
    Sudden impact /head crash  (hard drive jarred during operation, heads can bounce)
    Electrical surge   (fries the controller board, possibly also causing heads to write the wrong data)
    Bearing / Motor failure   (spindle bearings or motors wear during any and all use, eventually leading to HD failure)
    Board failure   (controller board failure on bottom of HD)
    Bad Sectors   (magnetic areas of the platter may become faulty)

  • Help with an external hard drive enclosure

    I had a Power Mac G5 that had a motherboard which died. The hard drives were still good so I purchased the "EAGLE Consus D-Series ET-CSDU2J-BK JBOD 2Bay SATA to USB 2.0 External Enclosure". I have it on the setting which both of drives show up on the desktop individually. So far it works and everything is great but I would really like to make it so it combines both hard drives (two seagate 160GB of the same model) into one 320 hard drive. I have a macbook pro running OS X. Do i have to reformat and erase everything before I change it to spanning or can i just switch the jumper and have one hard drive image with all my data still on it? Thanks
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    RAIDing the two will destroy the data on the drive. I'm sure that's explained in the manual.

  • "open with" wakes external hard drive

    Whenever I use "open with" from the contextual menu or the similar "edit with" in Transmit, the system looks for apps on my external hard drives. This slows things down and unnecessarily wakes the drives.
    Those drives are set not to be indexed by spotlight. Is there a way to prevent LaunchServices from looking at them as well, and ONLY look at my primary drive for apps?
    Eric

    unmount the external drive and run the following terminal command
    /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user
    this will rebuild the launch services database and remove any entries from the external drives from it. however, if you open any folder on the external containing an application, it will be added to the launch services database and this behavior will resume.

  • Please help me! My MacBook was stolen along with an external hard drive that had all my photos of my children on them. I hadn't backed to iCloud or backed anywhere else. I am distraught. No find my mac either...help...please...

    Please help me! My MacBook was stolen along with an external hard drive that had all my photos of my children on them. I hadn't backed to iCloud or backed anywhere else. I am distraught. No find my mac either...help...please... Some programmes are still running like drop of and Skype... Is it all over?!?

    Yes, the Old Master file has a folder for each year where I find all photos from that specific year. I am attaching a screen shot of the file.
    In the meantime i have managed to download all photos (it did not download any video files though in mpg, avi, 3gp, m4v,mp4 and mov format) to a new iphoto library. Unfortunately the photos are quite mixed and often doubled up. I ma considering to purchase iphoto library which checks all duplicates in iphoto. this will save me a lot of time. What do you think?

  • Can you help me with my External Hard Drive?

    Hey everyone,
    I'm having a big problem with my external hard drives. Firstly, I'll give you all the information I think you might need-
    * I'm running on Mac OSX 10.4.11.
    * I have the most recent release 13" Macbook and it has plenty of memory left.
    * Both my EHD's are made by LACIE. One is 250GB (18 months old) and the other 500GB (2 weeks old).
    * Both work perfectly on every other computer I've tried - (2 Macs and 2 Windows).
    * Both are formatted as FAT32 because I need to use them on Mac at home and Windows at work.
    Now, the problem is every time I mount one of the EHDs on my laptop, they show up on the desktop but when double clicked (or Apple + O 'ed) they cause Finder to have a spaz, with the top white bar disappearing along with everything on my desktop (for about 2s).
    What I have *tried so far*-
    * Mounting and unmounting the EHDs.
    * Turning on and off both EHDs.
    * Plugging them in one at a time.
    * Restarting the Macbook and plugging them in after it has fully loaded.
    * Restarting the Macbook and plugging them in as it loads.
    * Creating a new user account to open them in.
    * Verifying both EHDs using Disk Utility - both claim to be working properly.
    * That trick where you take out the battery and power source, hold down the On button for 5s, then hold Apple + P + R + Option while the Macbook turns back on.
    None of these have worked so far. Please help!
    Thank you so much in advance,
    Joe

    Have you tried opening them in a Finder window? Also, you might boot to your Install DVD and launch Disc Utility to verify and repair both permissions and your drive.
    Sounds strange. I also have the Lacie 500G - partitioned, but with one being FAT 32 ...works fine for me.

  • HT1229 what is the best method for using a iphoto with an external hard drive for greater capacity?

    what is the best method for using a iphoto with an external hard drive for greater capacity?

    Moving the iPhoto library is safe and simple - quit iPhoto and drag the iPhoto library intact as a single entity to the external drive - depress the option key and launch iPhoto using the "select library" option to point to the new location on the external drive - fully test it and then trash the old library on the internal drive (test one more time prior to emptying the trash)
    And be sure that the External drive is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) (iPhoto does not work with drives with other formats) and that it is always available prior to launching iPhoto
    And backup soon and often - having your iPhoto library on an external drive is not a backup and if you are using Time Machine you need to check and be sure that TM is backing up your external drive
    LN

  • Problem with Time Capsule used with an External Hard Drive (with it's own power supply)

    I have a mid 2012 Macbook Pro with Mavericks installed. I have the latest Time Capsule (802.11 ac) with an external hard drive hooked up via the USB port. The external hard drive was taken from an older Mac desktop machine and is formatted correctly (Mac OS Extended Journaled). The external hard drive has it's own power supply and shows up fine when connected directly to my laptop.
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    My finder settings are set this way:
    My FInder appears this way, with the Time Capsule selected:
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    I've tried unplugging and restarting my Time Capsule and the External Drive with no luck.
    Any advice?
    Thanks.

    Welcome to Mavericks.. and its new concept of network drives not just being hard to find like in Mountain Lion but totally invisible.
    Apple changed over Mavericks to using SMB2 by default.. broken and flawed SMB2.
    Change over to AFP by manually mounting the TC drives.
    I strongly recommend the first thing you do is change the TC names to SMB standard.. that just helps.
    Short, no spaces and pure alphanumeric.
    So rather than the very Generic THE Airport Time Capsule.. you make it even more Generic with TC1 (each subsequent TC increment the number. )
    LAN Storage is not a good name either for USB drive.. especially now that it is WAN Storage.. WStore for example.. but whatever makes sense to you.
    The name itself doesn't matter. .following the rules, short no spaces and pure alphanumeric does. Everything, conforms.
    Now in Finder.. Go, Connect to Server.
    AFP://TC1 or AFP://10.0.1.1 (you can use either the name (now that it is proper network name) or the IP address .. replace with your actual name or IP).
    The computer will find the resources and then ask you for a password.. this is required, even if default,, which is public.. so type in your password or public if you did not change it.
    Store the password in your keychain.
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  • I've been getting the error message "The disk you inserted was not readable by the computer". I can't open system preferences, disk utility, or Time Machine. I'm guessing it has something to do with my external hard drive, although it hasn't been touched.

    I've been getting the error message "The disk you inserted was not readable by the computer". I can't open system preferences, disk utility, or Time Machine. I'm guessing it has something to do with my external hard drive, although it hasn't been touched lately, but I can't figure out how to solve the problem. Any suggestions? Thank you!

    Thanks for your quick response. I had a look at your discussion... I tried it on a Windows machine and I thought that was compatible with ExFAT?
    Therefore I need to attempt to use my external hard drive with a machine that boasts OS X 10.6.5 or above and then it should work?
    Thanks

  • Using Itunes with an external hard drive

    I have an old powerbook which has become full with all my music. I have bought an external ION hardrive. All i want to do is transfer my entire music collection to the ION drive, whilst keeping all the titles and artist info within itunes, so that it acts as a frontline database that points to the external harddrive. I do not feel the need to have any music on my internal harddrive and am happy to only ever be able to access my music with the external hard drive attached.
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    Thanks for the help. I should point out that there is only one powerbook involved, not 2. Anyway, I have done that and indeed my ION external hardrive shows all the music files, but they are no longer featured in itunes at all. i thought i would see th titles of my library there, but the actual files would be on my external hard drive.
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  • Fubar with my external hard drive and not all Match items will play in iTunes on my Air but will on Apple TV. Any thoughts?

    My entire library is on iTunes Match however after a recent fubar with my external hard drive, whilst I can play all my music through Apple TV I can't access it all on my Air. This was the original device used to download. Any thoughts?
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    I'm not very technically minded so if anyone can help this poor, frustrated individual I would be very grateful.

    When you say "when i double click on my itunes files it just opens up this list of music." it doesn't mean anything to me. You need to explain clearly, remember I only know what you tell me.
    I need to understand how you have things set up and if you had you iTunes library database on the external drive or the c: drive. That is the iTunes folder containing iTunes library.itl.
    What do you see when you open iTunes on the new PC, are your music files there. If not, every time you play a track it gets added to itUnes so you should at least have some files in your library.
    What problem are you trying to solve? Is just getting the tracks into your iTunes library, or are you also concerned about ratings, count and playlists from the old PC. If so do you still have access to the old PC?

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