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    Need to reinstall my PC and worried about my iPod

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by josmol, Feb 10, 2009.

  1. josmol

    josmol Notebook Consultant

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    Top of the morning to you all!

    First I must admit that I really did search both the main forums and even specifically in the Apple and Mac OS X forums and didn't find a really good answer to this question. It seems that mostly folks agree that iTunes itself should do a good enough job of backing things up.

    Here's the deal...

    My wife's notebook needs to have the OS reinstalled. Just to simply clean it up, make it faster, etcetcetc. In the past when we've done this everything always goes smoothly EXCEPT for the iPod.

    She has a couple of purchased music on it, she has a couple of purchased games and even a movie, as well as TON of music, 20 GB or so (funny, we used to think that was a lot but it seems not, many people have several times this). The iPod has always given me difficulties with restoring only the purchased stuff, games and the music pieces we purchased legit. Twice before I have managed to cram things back on there with various 3rd party software but the names escape me since it typically takes several hours of installing this, trying this, uninstalling and try again with something else.

    My wife's notebook is a PC (sorry Mac folks) and she is running Vista. When we go to 'reinstall' we are simply going to use the restore partition and install our other software from there.
     
    josmol, Feb 10, 2009
    #1
  2. Jervis961

    Jervis961 Hall monitor

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    If you have not done the reinstall yet there are 2 things to do in preparation.

    1. Back up your iTunes library to a DVD
    2. de-authorize the computer

    After you reinstall the OS and then iTunes you can restore your library using the back up disk and authorize the computer again. This way you keep all your purchases and libraries. iTunes may think it is syncing your iPod with a new computer but is should just recycle everything on the iPod and effectively change nothing. Good luck.
     
    Jervis961, Feb 10, 2009
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  3. 00fez

    00fez Notebook Deity

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    Yes, what Jervis said will work. I've done it myself. Now I just keep my library in an external hard drive. It's getting too big to keep on my main drive.
     
    00fez, Feb 10, 2009
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  4. josmol

    josmol Notebook Consultant

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    Thank you for the replies - I bookmarked this thread for future reference and will let you guys know how things go this weekend when I do the clean up on her computer.
     
    josmol, Feb 11, 2009
    #4