[tommyleeselbow@hotmail.c]

Hi,

I have a 2Ghz Macbook, running 1MB RAM, all standard elsewhere.
My iTunes was getting too large for the 60GB internal drive so I shifted it to an external 50G device. This works well in the main, until I went to put some tunes on a new 8GB nano. As I dragged items over, they started to copy then the whole process stopped. I'm new to macs so this didnt worry me too much until I came back about 10 mins later and it was still stalled.
I got round this by moving the songs I wanted on the nano to the internal HD, telling iTunes this was the library and it all dragged across happily.
Now my external drive is filling up, I decided to get a firewire external drive (80 Gb iomega if that makes any difference) and want to move my library there, but after starting the copy, my machine just hangs.
I have another external drive now too, a 320 GB Trekstor (usb 2), and if I try and copy the library there too, the same happens.
Both the smaller drives are fomatted to mac and I left the 320 gig one as fat32 as I want my windoze machine to access some of the files too.

Am I doing something fundamentally wrong or is this a genuine problem?

I would like any advice anyone has as I want to upgrade my ipod to an 80Gig one and if the drives wont copy then I'm a bit stuck.

Thanks in advance people

[Big Mac]

Everything hangs? That shouldn't happen.

[Nivag]

Can you create a second user account and then test to see if the machine hangs?

I've got a MacBook and have my iTunes on a external HD and have never had a problem (touch wood) with it. I connect using USB2 or Firewire, depending on my needs.

[tommyleeselbow@hotmail.c]

just before i left for work tonight i tried copying my itunes folder to the 320 gig hard drive.
i got the copy window saying there were 12000 odd files and it would take something daft like 10.871 hours to copy, so Ive left it be and will see what its done by the time i get home

[Waragainstsleep]

I would always choose firewire over USB 2.0 if you have a choice. Not only is it faster, its way more stable. Pity it never caught on with other manufacturers. Firewire flash drives cost silly money compared to USB equivalents. And they never would have had to remove it from the iPod either.

[screamingFit]

The manufacturer of bridge chip in the enclosure has a very BIG role in the part of stability - especially when copying over a bunch of files. I've had this type of failure on Windows or Mac computers, USB 2 or Firewire, usually with cheapo enclosures.

If you can find out who manufactured your bridge chip, you can sometimes download updated firmware from them and apply it - or you can sometimes get updated firmware from the manufacturer of the enclosure.