what does reload your laptop mean?

what level of work do you describe as being "a lot of hassle"?

You don't know what reload laptop means????? Meaning I had to reload the system from scratch wiping all of the data off and making the laptop as it was when I bought it. The external drive contains all of my crates and music as well as my hard drive on the laptop did. However after the reload and I reinstall ScratchLive I can't tell ScratchLive where my music library is now so it sees my crates, etc.

good sir, maybe they call it "reload" at the McDonalds when they do a reinstall on their registers but I'm not certain what terminology you are accustomed to hearing.

"reload" is not the common term for this action. "reinstall" (as in reinstall the operating system) is a a better choice. i assumed that you meant "reinstall" but I would not offer you advice unless I was certain where you are at in your process.

you need to go into itunes and re-import your music and then scratch live will see it.

please forgive me if i sounded rude

I am an IT Systems Administrator so I am very familiar with terminology, i didn't take it as rude, just want to know the answer to my problem. I do not use ITunes, how else can this be done.

well you can then open the "import" pane in serato and reimport your mp3 files but this is so obvious I wouldn't imagine that it is the information you need.

I suspect that you would rather reassign the library for serato however while this would be the intelligent choice this is simply not possible.

are my assumptions correct?

You are correct...the other problem is that I am showing duplicates of everything with one of them being "File Not Found" and the other one is actually there. I like and had a nice clean library, i do not want to lose any of my custom crates, etc. It would be nice to not have to delete everything in my library only and then re-import everything...that would take forever as the size of my collection is significant.

well it seems that you already know what I am going to tell you but you don't want to hear it & I don't want to have to say it either.

I agree that it would be nice not have to delete everything in my library only and then re-import everything. Unfortunately it is not nice at this time.

what if you just plug in your firewire drive? isn't all the crate information contained there? shouldn't it simply add the your library to your serato list (which should be empty if you reinstalled your OS)?

i assume that you tried that already or you wouldn't be in IT.

How does it retain your crates but not recognize your songs? This statement is confusing:

"The external drive contains all of my crates and music as well as my hard drive on the laptop did." does that mean you had music on your laptop and your HD (as opposed to just being on your HD for example)?

Nonono...the external drive contains the same crate files just like my laptop hard drive did. Nothing is different between them. I only wanted a way to easily have SSL recognize the new location thats all. :)

try scratchtools by nik39. just do a search for it. i think it does what you need.

ballistic i assume the ext has a backup for your internal since ssl isn't reading off the ext. the only to have ssl read the files from ext (even if it's the same as your internal) is to add it to your library. then you will have dupes (stuff from both int/ext).

this a complex task that you want to accomplish. but can be done very easily by using scratchtools or itunes.