UKC

Ok, so my ipod was synched with my desktop. The desktop is now totally bust and unworkable and about to go in the skip, and so I now have a laptop instead. Is there any way of transferring my music from ipod onto the laptop? itunes seems to only allow me to transfer the tunes I purchased from them.

In reply to nickinscottishmountains:

If the hard drive in the desktop is OK, the easiest way is going to be to invest in a USB drive cradle for the laptop and get them that way. Another recent thread discusses that.

It traditionally is possible to get music off an iPod, but it's not made easy (to stop people just passing iPods full of music around) as the filenames are a bit obscure and the layout really odd.

Neil

In reply to nickinscottishmountains: Apple actually have an online support document called "How to use your iPod to move your music to a new computer": http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1329 Does that help at all?

In reply to Neil Williams: Thanks Neil. Unfortunately I cannot start the computer, it gets part way then crashes everytime.

In reply to Martin W: Hi Martin, how are you these days? Unfortunately I canot get the old computer to start so cannot do what this link suggests.

In reply to nickinscottishmountains:

Surely you shouldn't need to be able to start the old computer? I'd try getting a USB hard drive cradle as suggested above, physically remove your hard drive from your old desktop and put it into the cradle then plug in to your new laptop.

Hopefully, as long as the drive itself isn't kaput, your laptop will be able to see all of the files on it and it will be a simple case of drag and drop.

That's effectively what I did when my old system wasn't working. The hard drive in my case was being very temperamental so I put a second hard drive into my desktop, loaded it with Ubuntu and made that the boot drive. Once up and running I could explore my old hard drive at will and retrieve all my important files from it.

In reply to nickinscottishmountains:

Do you know what form the crash takes?

My proposal is to take it to bits, remove the HD and buy a drive cradle, a device for connecting the hard drive directly to your laptop.

Neil

In reply to Siward:

"The hard drive in my case was being very temperamental so I put a second hard drive into my desktop, loaded it with Ubuntu and made that the boot drive. Once up and running I could explore my old hard drive at will and retrieve all my important files from it."

Another option can be to boot the old machine on a bootable Linux DVD and copy your stuff onto a USB stick. But that depends on how technical you are.

Neil

In reply to nickinscottishmountains: Sorry, I didn't spot that the documented process required the old computer to be functioning. I think the answer may lie in what Neil Williams suggested ie take the hard drive from your old desktop and hook it up to the laptop using a USB caddy. Follow the instructions in the section entitled "Restoring your iTunes Library backup" in this support article: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1751

If the hard drive in your old desktop is IDE then I have an IDE-USB caddy that I'd be happy to lend you for this purpose.

(Having at last acquired a set of touring skis & boots last year, I'd be interested if you have any outingsinscottishmountains in mind for this season.)

In reply to nickinscottishmountains:

If you haven't got a caddy then all you need is to find someone who will let you plug your old disk drive into a vacant socket on their desktop PC. Depending on your drive this will need an IDE or SATA socket to be free. You can then copy the music files to either an external disk or a dvd or usb key etc.