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I had another session with Itunes. A client wanted to move the library from one machine to another in their home office. All of the usual fixes just didn’t work, so I will add below my chosen method on moving an iTunes library, on a PC.

(1)On the current iTunes machine, Go to “Edit>Preferences>Advanced>General”. You will see a path listed as “iTunes Music Folder Location” showing “My Documents etc.” I suggest you change this to “C:\iTunes_Music\”, Click OK and close the Properties view. This hasn’t changed anything yet, Now click on “Advanced>Consolidate Library.” This will now move all of the music to the new location you previously entered. This may take some time.

Once complete, copy that folder across to the new machine KEEPING the folder path identical to the one you used on the first machine at step(1).

Once complete, Browse to the “My Music/iTunes” folder and copy the the documents “iTunes Library.itl” and “iTunes Music Library.xml” plus the “Album Artwork” folders across to the new machine, storing these files in the appropriate “My Music/iTunes” folder.

Once the music is copied over, and you have copied the two files plus Album Artwork, you should start iTunes. Register with the iTunes Store and Authorise your computer. After doing all of this, close iTunes and re-open it. Everything should work just fine on the new machine.

Let me know how you get on please!

I revisited the previous data backup and recovery job today. The data was recovered by PC world and copied to an external USB drive before I got there. PC World appears to have missed a few important folders and data spaces, but since we had the original drive (and there was nothing wrong with it) I set it up inside my USB/CAT5 caddy. Finding the data on the drive was no problem, allowing me to complete the transfer.

iTunes is annoying. Very annoying. iTunes simply would not recognise the library data even though everything was copied over correctly. I ended up creating a fake library location on the new machine to correspond with the location used by the old PC. I then managed to get iTunes to detect and import this data (after authorising everything!) At this point iTunes was happy, but I wasn’t. The data was in the wrong place. Moving the data folder in iTunes and Consolidating the data moved the files where I wanted them. Now to clean up all of the crap required to keep iTunes happy. Why do they make this so difficult? There is no need to do all of this work. Just create a folder structure and work within it please, don’t route all the XML data with hard paths, that’s just annoying.

Anyway, with iTunes kicked and accepting its fate, on to completing the data backup systems. Shared folders were built, allowing the machines to sync to each other. The client is happy using Microsoft Backup so we run this and set it off. Everything was working nicely on both machines.

Nice, except for the iTunes crap.

I got a call from a friend. “Can you tell me how to use my video camera please?”

Well, no, I can’t because I’ve never seen it. We’re talking off a brand new DVD cam-corder, a Sony DVD-109E I believe. I said I’d get back to him. I searched out the manual, which I duly downloaded. Sony used to be a pain to get manuals for, but thankfully they seem to have eased up a little. The whole process was very easy. Thanks Sony.

So here I sit with the Sony manual on my screen trying to understand this stuff without the machine in my hand. That’s quite a difficult thing you know. Supporting something you’ve never seen or touched.

Oh well, I’m going out to see how things look tomorrow morning. Hopefully it’ll be a quick and easy “job for a friend” as I’ve got a busy day ahead installing a server and backup software. More later.

So, previously I mentioned a job that involved a new PC. When I arrived on site at the clients location, I checked the situation and quickly found out the PC had no Internet access. It wasn’t receiving an IP address from the router. Funny that, everything was configured properly and the PC was plugged into the first port on the router.

I plugged in my laptop, and set it for DHCP. Everything worked for me at IP level, but I had no internet connection. I moved the clients CAT5 cable to another port on the router and it instantly got an IP.

Hmm. The WAN connection was up on the external modem and it was plugged into the WAN port on the router. Everything should be OK. I tried the clients laptop and it connected to the router just fine wirelessly but agiin, no internet.

I checked the cables and they were all fine. At this point the client noticed the cables and commented that they were the wrong way around. I swapped them out of curiosity and the network kicked it complete with broadband. Wait a minute, what just happened?

Checking the router again I see that the WAN connection to the internet was connected to PORT1 on the LAN side and the new PC was conencted to the WAN port on the router! This isn’t right! That can’t happen! But it did.

I cannot explain, to this day, how this worked. The router must have been scrambled or had a bad firmware, or something. There’s no way this should have worked but it did. We decided not to diagnose this any further and got on with the jobs at hand. Whatever that D-Link router was up to I don’t know, I wish I knew as this one will spin in my head for some time to come!

We got a call to a job the other day. A client had just bought a new PC to be delivered by PC World. The old machine had died at boot up, something about the drive being corrupt. Anyway, we got the call to visit and configure their new machine. PC World were late ordering the replacement PC so after delays getting the machine to the client, we were off!

On arrival at the site there were a wide range of tasks to complete. Installing three printer drivers on two machines, rebuilding the network (more on that later!), recovery of data and configuring remote desktop. Well, it turns out PC World did not return the data drive so data recovery was out. I set up the various printers (downloading all of the drivers, HP your site sucks!) We then configured XP Remote Desktop to allow the client to access their laptop from the new PC. Thankfully the client had the vision to search out a machine that still had XP on it, so this task was eased a little.

XP, yes XP on a new machine in August 2008. XP service pack 2 I might add. It’s not even a recent version! Updating to SP3 and adding the remaining updates completed the job, so far. We will return to this one when PC World recover the data on the old drive, or give up and return it.

Whatever happens I’m sure I’ll be running Spinrite past the drive and booting from Ubuntu to see what remains of the data.