iTunes star ratings, play count, playlist info

Your question is very unclear. If you actually moved the iTunes library folder to the new drive, then you would have kept all the info the library file contained. It sounds like you moved your music files to the new hard drive, but then started a new iTunes library file. If that's what you did, then you may have lost all the previous information. The iTunes library folder has a default location in the MacIntosh HD/user/(your name)/music/iTunes folder. It's possible that a copy of the older library file has been kept.

O.K. so it sounds like I transferred the iTunes library incorrectly.

How do I do it correctly?

The iTunes library file keeps track of where the music files are located, so when copying your music files you would have to maintain the same drive heirarchy in the new location in order to make use of the old library file. Assuming that's the case all you have to do is copy the old library file to the location I mentioned above. You will lose whatever changes you've made in the interim.

Ed-

I may be headed in the same direction... I had been using LaCie 250 GB drives, but just had a disk crash on my second data drive that wiped out 300 CDs or so. I had gambled that I'd be OK through the ripping process, so it wasn't backed up--was going to do that when the disk was done. Even worse, I went ahead to back up the first data drive, about 2% of the data was generating CRC errors.

I am now thinking that the external drives for consumers currently available really aren't ready for prime time. At least not 24x7 operation and having people actually use the capacity that is available.

I was thinking about the Buffala terastation, 1 TB (700 GB w/RAID 5) due out in Feb., but I'm totally losing faith in consumer storage. If this thing is built around Maxstor consumer drives, it just may not be worth it in the end. So... I had previously checked with Dell and was looking at $14K for 1 TB of NAS RAID 5 storage. That doesn't work. I briefly looked at the $3K Niveus 1 TB media server but, again, I'm guessing its built on consumer hardware. So... I'm now looking at an xServe w/3x400GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration.

Is that where you ended up? Have you used your xServe with Windows devices (most of my 'puters are WinXP)? Did you go with the cluster version or the normal one? Any help would be appreciated...