Are you transferring to/from a regular desktop PC?
If so there are a few ways you can do it.
The absolute easiest way is to either burn your library to DVDs or dump it onto USB sticks and transfer it a bit at a time. This, however, is ridiculously time consuming and wastes a lot of discs if you have anything over about 10GB in your library.
If you're transferring from XP to Vista, you could try getting hold of a
Windows Easy Transfer cable or a
Cat 5 network crossover cable (you'll need to download
this program onto the XP computer (Vista already has it, and the WET cable comes with a cd rom)) and transfer it all that way. Hope you have better luck than I did if you try this way though...
The easiest other way is probably to get yourself a
3½" hard-disk caddy. Remove the harddrive from your old computer - assuming you feel confident to do this - and put it in the box, then you just plug it into the new computer (using either a USB cable or an eSATA depending on what kind of drive it is**) and use it like a regular external drive. You'll need to find out what kind of harddrive you have so you get the right box, but it's a pretty easy thing to do. You can either run iTunes from there or copy everything to your new drive.
There's a tutorial
here - you can ignore anything after step 6 as you're not reformatting.
The other way is to use a spare drive slot in your new computer (if you have one), fit the spare drive as a slave then you don't have to transfer anything***. Again, you'll need to know what kind of drive it is so you use the right cables. This has the possibility of causing damage to your new computer if you don't know what you're doing though, so if you're not 100% confident with messing around inside: DON'T DO IT! Ask a favour from a techy mate or take it to a shop.
There's a tutorial
here. It sounds way more complicated than it is - essentially all you're doing is undoing a couple of screws and changing some cables over.
The advantage of taking the disk with you is that the iTunes database will remain intact so your new iTunes won't have to catalogue everything again and all your stored artwork should survive.
** If your computer's more than a couple of years old, chances are it will have a
PATA drive.
*** It's pretty much a given that your new computer will have a
SATA drive - PATA and SATA connectors are quite different so you can't plug one into the other by mistake. Your BIOS will tell you what sort you have.
by Keith Richard » 18th May 08, 21:07 