Want to move videos from windows media player to external hard drive

paul2468

When i plugged in the portable hard drive it showed up on my pc but on media player it is showing that no device is plugged in, i want to transfer about 80 videos that i have collected on my old desktop that i have had for about 6 years...can anyone help please, the portable hard drive is Hitachi 320gb...or is there another way i can go about it....cheers...:beer:

fwor

If I wanted to copy videos from one drive to another, I wouldn't use Media Player to do it! As the name implies, it's meant for playing files, not moving them about.

You don't say what version of Windows you have, but if you can see the drive in My Computer, just find the files on the desktop's hard drive, highlight them, right-click, Copy and then Paste them into a folder on the external drive. Job done - though it may take a ~long~ time to finish...

Avoriaz

And, when you transfer them, make at least one other separate copy so that you have a back up.

Otherwise you will probably be on here soon asking us how to recover your vitally important videos from a failed, lost or stolen hard drive.

Copying them rather than transferring (moving) them would give you two copies.

paul2468

fwor wrote: »

If I wanted to copy videos from one drive to another, I wouldn't use Media Player to do it! As the name implies, it's meant for playing files, not moving them about.

You don't say what version of Windows you have, but if you can see the drive in My Computer, just find the files on the desktop's hard drive, highlight them, right-click, Copy and then Paste them into a folder on the external drive. Job done - though it may take a ~long~ time to finish...

Sorry, it is windows xp....when it come to anything like this i am no good..

custardy

so you mean on My Computer it doesnt show?

paul2468

custardy wrote: »

so you mean on My Computer it doesnt show?

The photos show fine, i have copied them...where it says my videos when i click on that it says real player downloads...and when i click on that there is nothing...the only place i can find my videos is in windows media player.

fwor

Windows Media Player doesn't store any media files anywhere. It just acts as a catalogue of media files already on your hard disk.

So now you just need to find where your files actually are (by finding out where WMP is looking). Should be near-trivial I would guess, though I can't say for sure as I don't use Media Player (or anything else from Microsoft for that matter) myself.

custardy

right click on the appropriate video in media player
in properties it will tell you the location
also in the left pane. you may see the drive liseted