[FTrain]

Need to understand what might have happened--all of my music has disappeared from iTunes.

I'm currently running my old white dome iMac on an external harddrive because the internal HD failed. So, my set-up is this:

HD1: OSX and system files
HD2: media drive with pics and music
HD3: backup

It's been temperamental and crashes frequently, but we've at least gotten by for several weeks like this. Last night, everything was fine. This morning, woke up the computer and HD3 was missing from the desktop, and there was no music in iTunes. I checked preferences, and iTunes is still mapped to my iTunes music folder in HD2. I tried re-mapping to another drive, then mapping back to iTunes, and nothing happened? I checked HD2 and the music is all still there. But iTunes won't recognize it.

Any idea what happened? How do I fix this? I've re-booted, and still nothing. Would love your advice. Thanks.

[B Gallagher]

Have you tried running disk utility on the drive?

[FTrain]

Yes. It reports no problems.

I shut the computer and all three drives off last night because oddly enough sometimes letting them "rest" has helped with some of the myriad other problems that have cropped up with this set-up. When I rebooted this morning, all three drives are back, but the music still doesn't show up in iTunes. I can play the songs if I click on each one individually--they files are still there. And when I click on them, they appear in the iTunes library and are there when I re-open iTunes the next time. But it won't map to the entire file of songs.

I don't have the time to click several thousand songs individually. Nor should I have to. What causes this kind of thing? I didn't touch a thing.

[B Gallagher]

One possiblity I'm thinking of is that finder may have for some reason or another decided that your external drive is another drive with the same name. Sweep your boot drive with Omni Disk Sweeper, and see what comes up in the root "Volumes" folder. In my case, I get IPOD, IPOD 1, IPOD 2, and IPOD 3 (all the same iPod Shuffle). As I said, I'm not sure why it does this, but anyways. See if the external drive that all your music is on comes up more than once here.

If it does, close iTunes, copy the the iTunes Music Library.xml file. Rename the original to iTunes Music Library (Backup).xml or something similar. Open this file with textedit, and search for the string <key>Location</key>. In my case, for an external drive, this brings up:

<string>file://localhost/Volumes/#external drive#/#file name.mp3#</string>

Do a find and replace on the whole document, changing the name of the external drive (adding " 1", " 2", or whatever it may be). Save, and open up iTunes again. Hopefully now it should find all your files!