For the past 3 years, I have had a 40gb Creative Zen Jukebox MP3 player which I have been happy with. Now I want to purchase an iPod due to accessories. My question - I have thousands of songs on my computer that did not come through iTunes. Can I load them on an iPod? I can put them on my Zen very easily, but they are not "coded" with iTunes security or whatever that is. Does this matter? I don't want to buy an iPod if I can't keep all of the music I already have. Surely there is a way around it. I have just never touched an iPod so I don't know if it works the same. Thanks in advance for your advice!

I recently bought and installed a new 160gb HDD. I then made my old 40gb HDD a secondary hard disk. I have reinstalled Windows XP on the new (master) HDD. As i have my old HDD installed as a second drive, i made a link on my new desktop to my old destop. Everything is accessable, apart from 1 folder which i kept my mp3's and movies!!! There is about 5gb of stuff in that folder. Anyway, everytime i try to open the folder, an error message pops up: "access is denied". I can't work it out. I've looked at the file sharing options, tried dragging and dropping into another folder, but nothing can do it. not even an external program, like winamp or windows media player, can access it!!! The rest of the data on the HDD is fully accessable. anyone have any ideas?
I don't actually have a security tab on the properties. No option to take ownership. Any free programs on the web that i can download to access this data? I'm not trying to recover deleted data.

I don't want to have to use any software like iTunes, Windows Media Player, or Gigabeat Room.
I want to be able to use the mp3 like a hard drive and just copy songs over to the drive.

I do not want an ipod. I currently have an iriver H320 and love it, but it is over two years old and literally falling apart.