I'm gonna make this as clear as I can

[kjaxplicit24]

I have a 2009 MBP with an 80gb ssd in an optibay enclosure along with a 1TB HDD internal drive. I keep all of my media, including all iTunes music, videos, and iOS apps in the iTunes folder on that drive. I point the iTunes preferences to read and store all media on that drive. Nothing is stored locally to the SSD.

OK, now for the problem. I clean installed OSX Lion last night on the SSD. Everything went relatively smoothly. I backed up the iTunes folder from the SSD (with what I thought would include song play count, playlists, and album art, etc) onto the 1TB for which I created a separate 'backup' folder. I opened iTunes for the first time, pointed my media location to the same folder as I had when running Snow Leopard, and copied over the iTunes folder with song play count, playlists, and album art, etc back onto the SSD.

Long story short, the only thing that was transferred back was some of the album art. Play count, playlists, etc are all lost. But what is not working as it should is when I download apps. They are not being seen from the 1TB and when I download a new application from the iTunes store, it downloads to the SSD instead of to the 1TB HDD which is where I tell it to download.

Please help me sort this out! I searched the internet for solutions but to no avail!

 

[robgendreau]

Manual copying is sometimes more perilous than migrating. There's a reason Apple spent time designing a process to do this. For example, what seems like a simple copy can play havoc with symbolic links and other stuff even there are changes, even small ones, in the file structure. A clone is a better way to go.

I'd see if you could open Migration Ass't and just migrate the itunes stuff over from your backup. You have a backup, right?

 

[iVeBeenDrinkin']

The whole secret to preserving iTunes play counts and so forth is to make sure the iTunes music library.xml file is in the iTunes folder. It can't be in another folder, it must be in the iTunes folder.

 

[kjaxplicit24]

The whole secret to preserving iTunes play counts and so forth is to make sure the iTunes music library.xml file is in the iTunes folder. It can't be in another folder, it must be in the iTunes folder.

The library.xml file was in the iTunes folder. I copied and pasted it over to the new iTunes folder in Lion. But no luck..like I said all the music files were there. But no play counts etc.

I copied over all the files from the attached picture...which is identical to what was in the itunes folder prior to the upgrade to lion

 

[kjaxplicit24]

Manual copying is sometimes more perilous than migrating. There's a reason Apple spent time designing a process to do this. For example, what seems like a simple copy can play havoc with symbolic links and other stuff even there are changes, even small ones, in the file structure. A clone is a better way to go.

I'd see if you could open Migration Ass't and just migrate the itunes stuff over from your backup. You have a backup, right?

I tried to use migration assistant. But it doesn't let me select, nor does it even show the external drive which is where my time machine backup is located. Heres a screenshot. Macintosh SSD is my main drive...not the time machine backup. Im not sure why the icon shows a time machine icon