The saga continues..(from Part I)…
So after many weeks of going cold turkey and doing some research, I finally found my answer on About.com. I used a program called iPodRip which was well worth the $14.95 I paid for it. I downloaded this program, ran it, opened up all the music (and videos!) on my iPod and copied it all back onto a new external hard drive I bought.
This took many hours but was finally done. It was thankfully in the right format, so then I pointed my iTunes music folder to that folder and imported it all to its library, which again took many hours. But it was mostly back.
All my videos were gone, but like I said it was unlikely that I would go back and watch all those episodes of Lost or Battlestar Galactica. If I wanted to watch them again, I resigned myself to buying the whole season again, since our nice friends at Apple decided that upon losing your copy of the music or videos, you’ll have to buy them again (wonderful).
So being Mr. Paranoid, I bought two other 750 GB hard drives on which I wanted to copy all my music, for a total of 3 copies of my iTunes folder. I figure, what’s the chance of all 3 hard drives dying at once? So after a few days delay, I finally decided to do that late last week when….my Mac mini decided to crash on me.
This story is never going to end. I tried Data Rescue on it, but didn’t want to retrieve the files; I wanted it back up and running! So tonight, I am bringing it to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store to see if they have suggestions. Ideally I could just reinstall Mac OS X again on the hard drive and everything would be fine…theoretically.
At least I’m not crying over this. I didn’t keep critical data on the Mac Mini hard drive. It’ll be a pain to reinstall everything but better than losing data….Sigh….