External Harddrive Help

Hey Mac-Forums, this is The Mac Man checking in. I'm loving the way this site looks, very helpful for newtime mac users. As a mac user for almost 5 years, the ol' harddrive has checked out. It's running at about 300Mb now, and it runs slower than a tortoise. The main problem is that I have 82Gb of music. I just got a new harddrive and I've heard that there are ways to screw up transferring music on it, aka a possibility of losing some of your music.

So I was wondering if you bright mac men out there could help me out, don't want to lose this music! Much appreicated!

if you're not involving itunes, you should be fine.
i'm not sure of details, but it sounds like you have the music on one external and want to move the music files to a second drive?
just connect both drives and copy the data from one to the other. once you ensure that the data is copied onto the other drive, you could reformat the old one and see if that helps the speed.

No I'm trying to get it off my mac onto an external harddrive.

even easier. only one drive to connect. should be faster too.

just do it within finder. by default, dragging files from one logial drive to another will copy them, not move them, so all you would initially be doing is making duplicates on the external. i can't imagine how you could accidentally delete them.

Let me clarify to the greatest extent.

I'm trying to move my music files to an external harddrive as it's plugged in so I can free up space on my mac harddrive. I initially want to move them to the harddrive as it's plugged in so I can still listen to music, while all music files are off my mac HD, and just on the harddrive. I've heard there can be problems with moving the music to an external.

See if this link answers your question.

Regards.

This is what I would do.
1.First do a time a time machine back up or any back up of the music.
2.Go to the music tab in finder and drag the entire itunes folder into the external.
3.Once copied Go to the itunes icon on the dock and click on it while holding option..continue to hold option till you get a box like shown.

Click choose library and choose the itunes folder on the external.
Once itunes opens make sure everything seems correct then right click on any song in the library then choose show in finder. This is to see if it shows the file on the external drive instead of your macs HD. If its on there then you can safely delete it from the macs HD.

You can simply drag the music into a new folder on the external drive, then remove the files from iTunes.
After that, go into iTunes preferences>advanced
uncheck the "copy music to iTunes folder" button, and then drag your files from the external into iTunes. You can then play and access them as before, they are just stored on the external drive.