I’m assuming the “raid” comment didn’t mean that the computer was booting off a raid.
If it is NOT based on a RAID array (or if it’s just a disk mirror)
Step 1: take the computer apart following normal “dont zap anything” procedures and take the hard drive out.
Step 2: buy a USB interface for whatever the drive uses (ATA, SATA, IDE, etc.). I’ve used this one before, and it does SATA, PATA, and IDE…I think.
Step 3: plug it into your mac.
Step 3a: if you’re paranoid, use ClamXAV to scan it for viruses.
Step 4: Search it. One way is this find /Volumes/your_drive_name/ -name "*.mp3" > list_of_mp3s &> /dev/null, (without the backticks) which will create a text file in the current directory that lists the path to each mp3. You can then add other file formats if you have them using the very similar find /Volumes/your_drive_name/ -name "*.flac" **>**> list_of_mp3s &> /dev/null command, changing the flac part to whatever other file formats you want in the list.
Then it’s a matter of turning that into a script that will copy/move the files wherever you want.
One way to do it:
Then they’ll all be in one folder on your Mac and you’re free to organize them however you want.
Or you can use Finder…I’m pretty sure it works too, I just don’t know how to do it because these are the exact things that CLI and scripting are good at. It’s also a very good example of why I prefer OS X to Windows…I have no idea how to do that on Windows. It took a couple minutes to write that script with google’s help, because the way I knew how to do it wasn’t as pretty.
Also note that while I’m pretty sure it’s right, I’m not 100% sure that script isn’t perfect…run at your own risk and make the obvious necessary changes. I don’t want to actually move crap around on my hard drive to test it. If it doesn’t work, it should throw an error instead of breaking stuff.
Step 5: Reiterate to yourself that Macs are just better at everything.
Step 6: throw your PC off a tall building or install linux on it so it’ll be useful for a change.
IF IT IS BASED ON A RAID****
You might be SOL. That’s one of the problems with RAID. Without being physically there, I don’t feel qualified to help you remove it from the computer. The basic idea is that you take all the drives out, preserving their ordering (probably by leaving the data cables plugged in) and rebuild the array settings on similar hardware in another computer without corrupting the data or formatting the drive. You can do that, but I’ve never done it outside of a server environment with a crap ton of extra hardware lying around.
Alternatively, if the RAID is implemented in hardware, you could use a Linux Live CD and follow steps 3a through 6 above, but that requires setting up networking on linux (not that hard, but it might be challenging depending on the hardware and your familiarity with bash) and setting up a share on your Mac or having an external hard drive available that is in a format linux can write and OS X can read or having one that you can format so that linux can write to it and OS X can read it (fat32 and NTFS are safe choices…I think linux can probably read and write HFS+ by now too…don’t know if OS X can read ext2/3 reiserfs, etc.).
Good luck.
