Disk Juggler

[Whoops! This post got stuck in "draft" and I didn't publish it when I expected to. No, it wasn't a TypePad problem; the whole "share my music library with all the Macs and AppleTVs in the house" thing didn't really work out like I'd hoped, and I delayed publishing this post hoping I'd find a resolution. Well, no resolution is in sight, so I'm going ahead and publishing this now.]

As I threatened earlier this last month, I pulled the trigger on a new Mac. With the announcement that the new 13" MacBook Pro would include a FireWire port—and that it would have lower pricing, too—I found the MacBook Pro to be a better alternative than just replacing my existing Mac mini with the latest one.

So now I'm having lots of fun rebuilding my system¹ and learning all the different multi-finger gestures that are possible with the trackpad. To the point of this post, though, the introduction of the new laptop means that there are several changes that I want to make to the home network. Primarily, since the mini is going to be relegated to secondary use I want to have it boot off its internal hard drive again (as opposed to the faster, external hard drive I'm currently using for the boot drive). That means I have to move all the music that's on the current internal drive somewhere else.

To make it even more interesting, I want to add a hard disk to my Airport Extreme Base Station and use that to serve up my music library to all the Macs in the house. The challenge there is that there's only one external hard drive in the house that has a USB interface, which is the only interface the AEBS uses for hard drives. (My FireWire bigotry strikes again.) An even bigger challenge is that this USB drive is what Michelle uses for backing up her Mac.

Fortunately, Michelle is very good at tolerating my geeky plans and agreed to swap drives with me, so for posterity, here's how I've juggled things around:

1. Move the contents of the "Audio" drive (mini's internal HD) to a folder on the "Video" drive (external FW drive).
2. Reformat "Audio"; change the name to "mini HD".
3. Use SuperDuper! to clone the "MiniBoot" drive (external FW startup drive) to "mini HD".
4. Change startup disk to "mini HD" and restart
5. Reformat "MiniBoot"; change the name to "Michelle's Backup" 
6. Use SuperDuper! to to clone the "Backup" drive (external FW drive MIchelle used for backup) to the "Michelle's Backup"
7. Reformat "Backup"; change the name to "Audio Library" 
8. Move the Audio files on the "Video" drive to "Audio Library"  

Whew! Now the "Audio Library" drive is hooked up to the AEBS and automatically shows up as a shared disk whenever someone on a Mac logs into my wireless network. Then I had to copy my iTunes folder from mini HD/Users/blake/Music over to the Music directory on my MacBook Pro to copy over all my album artwork, playlists, ratings, etc. (Note that I encountered some significant wonkiness here, where iTunes on the mini would refuse to recognize that the music files had changed locations. I eventually just quit iTunes, moved the entire iTunes folder to the Desktop, re-launched iTunes and let it create a new iTunes folder, then deleted the new iTunes folder and copied the iTunes folder from the MacBook Pro back over to the mini. Ugly.)

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1. After 4+ years the mini had collected enough cruft that I wanted to start with a clean slate, so I didn't use the otherwise excellent Migration Assistant to copy everything over automatically.