Copied music over from old computer, need help sorting

[jetsetter883]

I recently copied my enormous music folder from old HD to new HD and I am having trouble sorting the newly migrated files to how they appeared previously on my old computer. Whenever I downloaded an album on my old PC, the album folder would be the most recent in my List view. Now on the new computer I can't get these same folders to arrange any other way but alphabetically! I relied on the previous method of sorting so that I could always know where to look for recently downloaded albums. I have tried just about every 'Sort by' option there is on my new Win 7 machine.

Oddly enough individual music tracks that were not part of an album folder I can get to sort properly on the new machine (by order of download date) but all of the individual album folders within the Music directory seem to insist on sorting alphabetically! It's driving me crazy since I have no idea what my recently downloaded albums were (i have about 2k album folders)!

Please advise on how I can get it to sort like it was on my old HD, by date downloaded.

Edit: The created date on the old machine shows the original date the files were downloaded (naturally) but on the new machine shows the date that I transferred them which was yesterday. Is there any way I can carry over these dates to the new PC? I'll even re-transfer if I have to.

 

[boohbah]

ok, two solves here...
click the view tab in the music folder and select group by, then select date.
if the menu bar isn't showing to select view then click organize /layout/menu bar

to be able to move folders around in any order you need to disable auto arrange

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/92758-windows-explorer-auto-arrange-disable.html

good luck.

 

[jetsetter883]

Thanks you your reply boohbah, but unfortunately no luck with it.

I'm seeing now that my problem might be associated with Windows 7 not preserving the original file attributes, timestamps etc during regular ol Copy and Paste which is what I used to migrate the files over. I'm also seeing that there are programs and commands that may be able to accomplish this ("Robocopy"?). And apparently creating a zip file on the source drive and extracting to the destination drive may preserve the file attributes?

 

[boohbah]

it did occur to me after i posted that the date may show all the same on your files as they were moved on the same date,
the tips i gave will help you for future downloads and how you have your file/folder stucture if nothing else.