So the old netbook that was really just a hard drive with a screen isn’t recognising my iPhone anymore,yet does a portable hard drive. I have tried different cables, but no joy. Apple help is pretty vague, will ALL my library save on a hard drive,or just purchased content? Burning those CD’s in all those years ago was a pain after all.

Google is your friend my friend……

Three ways for starters http://m.wikihow.com/Transfer-Your-iTunes-Library-from-One-Computer-to-Another

Your itunes library is really nothing to do with your phone…. you phone just holds a copy of what is held elsewhere – either in your itunes library (“on the computer”), or on the itunes servers if you downloaded it straight onto your phone.

Does the netbook still work? If so, just navigate to the itunes library part of the hard drive and see whats there. They are just files on a hard-drive… same as anything else. to copy your library onto a different computer, you can just move the files using a portable hard drive. you won;t need to re-rip your CDs.

If you have purchased content on your phone, but haven’t yet downloaded these to your computer – you can either download them to your old computer, and then copy them across (as above), or just download them to your new computer once you have installed iTunes.

hopefully that makes sense

It does, it was me not making sense. That guide looks the ticket.

That guide is missing some important stuff if you value play counts and playlist info all ready in your iTunes library. You need to do this when you first start iTunes after copying the media folder en-masse to it’s new home.

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