Windows player will access files from any location. To synch to your iPod I think you just have to give you pod the new location of where the music is stored. That may mean a re-install but I've done that a few times and it doesn't take too long.

And of course, as everyone says, do a back up.

just be as simple as dragging them over to the hard drive, which acts just like a giant memory stick.

You may have to fiddle a little with settings on ITunes to make sure that any subsequent ripped CD's get saved to the hard drive and not the pc.

....copying the whole MyMusic folder you will get all the music and playlists, but WMP doesn't automatically get things like the track ratings. This annoyed me, but you may not care. Since I had a playlist of "All 4's & 5's", on the target machine I was able to call that up, SelectAll and just slapped a 5 on all of them. If I'd known I would have created a 3's playlist, a 4's playlist and a 5's playlist. Everything else I don't care about.

If you want to install a new C drive, the more extreme or safe method is that you could use the machine migration utility (called "Windows Easy Transfer" under Win7, can't remember what it was on XP and Vista). It's the tool they give you for when you buy a new machine and want to shift everything. I did this when my hard drive was dying, did a user extract to an external drive (several hours), installed new larger drive, installed OS, imported user. Immediately got pissed off because I had gone XP to Vista, used the XP exporter which wouldn't import into Vista. Had to re-install the old drive, get the XP-Vista compatible exporter and re-do the whole process. About 2 hours out and 2 hours in, plus all the installing guff.

if i move everything in my music folder to the ext drive will that now be my music library with my playlists and genre,years etc all intact(not ratings though) and thus free up my disc space.What i dont understand is if this is the case how media player will know that my library is now in the ext drive.