Ok big problem. I have all my music saved onto a 120Gig Western digital Portable Hard drive. i have an 80gig ipod. ive had it for about 5-6 months. i am now having a problem where it wont sync. what happends is that all of my music is in the itunes library. when i try to sync my ipod, none of the music syncs and all of the locations of the original file become lost. when i go into my hard drive and look, all of the files are missing. but when i either unplug the hard drive or restart my comp all of my music is there again. if i try again it does the same thing over and over. any suggestions? t would be appreciated. thanks.
Each time you connect up the portable hard drive, Windows will assign a drive letter to it. iTunes will assume that it is the same letter each time. However, if you connected the hard drive and any other USB device in a different sequence to previous occasions, it may well have a different drive letter. iTunes will not recognise this and will continue to look for the previous letter.
Another possibility is that if you disconnected a USB device without using the "Safely Remove Hardware" facility, that old drive letter is probably still listed and therefore the hard drive is given a new letter when you connect it, even if you powered off the PC in between times.
In itTunes, check the location of a missing file by using *Get Info* for the track, and on the summary tab look at the
Where to find which drive iTunes is looking at. Then check which letter has been assigned to your portable drive. Are they the same?
Each time you connect up the portable hard drive, Windows will assign a drive letter to it. iTunes will assume that it is the same letter each time. However, if you connected the hard drive and any other USB device in a different sequence to previous occasions, it may well have a different drive letter. iTunes will not recognise this and will continue to look for the previous letter.
Another possibility is that if you disconnected a USB device without using the "Safely Remove Hardware" facility, that old drive letter is probably still listed and therefore the hard drive is given a new letter when you connect it, even if you powered off the PC in between times.
In itTunes, check the location of a missing file by using *Get Info* for the track, and on the summary tab look at the
Where to find which drive iTunes is looking at. Then check which letter has been assigned to your portable drive. Are they the same?
ok well that was a good idea but when i look at the info on where itunes is looking for the file, it says not available. when i started to sync itunes was going to sync the majority of my ituns library because not all of the music had disappeared. it stoped syncing and said that there wasnt enough room on my ipod for all the stuff i wanted to sync. Now i have an 80 gig ipod. i only have about 30 gigs of stuff to sync. ituns only syncs about 1.5 gigs. any ideas or suggestions? could it be that my ipod is crap now?
In answer to your last question, no - your iPod is not a goner, but you need to work out what has happened first so that it doesn't happen again. I'm guessing that if you look at "Other" on your iPod you may find it's quite large.
Look on your iPod, go to the
Settings menu and choose the
About option; on that first display the graphic should show lots of blue (audio), some darker blue (video), some yellow/orange (photos if you have any) and a
small amount of orange/red (other). That's the sequence, don't worry if the colours are slightly off or not there. If the last one -
other is larger than the
audio then that's where your storage has gone!
I still think that your PC has allocated a different letter to the external hard drive compared to when you previously added the music. Then, when the iPod cannot find the music on your PC when synced, it moves the songs to "other". Have you checked to make sure there are no "rogue" drive letters still allocated and have you ruled out the possibility of connecting the hard drive in another sequence when connecting up other USB devices? (As I mentioned in my last post.) Once you have done that, then look in iTunes.
If I understand you correctly, only some of the songs (in iTunes) have an exclamation mark against them, while some do not, is that correct? If so, it means that iTunes cannot find the location of ones with exclamation marks. So look at some of the songs that do
not have an exclamation mark and try the *Get info/Where* to find out where iTunes thinks they are. Then check to see if the same drive letter is allocated to the hard drive when you connect it. They should be the same letter, are they?
If not, that's been the problem. If they are the same, try "asking" iTunes to see if it can now find the location of one of the missing tracks. (It's possible of course, that some newer added songs were added after the drive letter changed and this will be a problem, but let's hope not!)
So, what's the situation now? If you think the problem
is a changed drive letter, make sure that the correct drive letter is now allocated and then ask iTunes to find the missing songs. (Unfortunately, this might be on a song-by-song basis!)
Once you find the missing songs, (or if you don't you will just have to import them again into iTunes.) and your iTunes is now complete again, it's time to sort out the iPod.
Connect up the iPod and on the iTunes
Summary screen, use the
Restore function. This will restore your iPod to its factory settings
and remove everything from it, thus freeing up the missing storage space. then a fresh
Sync will add everything back onto the iPod again. As you can appreciate, all this will take a bit of time, which is why you need to understand what happened so you don't have to go through this again.
alright.i fixed the problem. i think it was a few things. first i believe that my ipod cord is getting bad so i bought a new one. now it connects perfectly. second, i have a feeling that my front 2 usb drives are going on the fritz as well but they are not totaly useless as they can still read some things plugged into them. i plugged my ipod cord into the back of the tower as well as my portable hard drive(which i think might be going bad as well because its been screwing lately after i fixed the problem).
Ok so i moved all my music to my other portable hard drive(Which is 500gigs). i tunes is reading fro that now. so when i plugged in my ipod, alot of my songs were missing again as u already know. all i did was delete the missing ones from itunes and re imported them. now everyting works fine.
so in a way you were right because some of the songs were still being read by my 120gig portable hard drive. other than that i think thats it. i will post another forum like this if anything happends again.
thanks for all of your help. it has really been appreciated. thanks again.
