Because my laptop has a small internal HD, I purchased a 500Gb external HD on which to store all of my iTunes songs. The iTunes app is on my C: drive, but the songs themselves were on an external E: drive. The external HD recently crashed, and needed to be sent out for recovery work. I have a 2nd external HD that I used for backup purposes. All of my iTunes songs, about 4,000 of them, are no longer accessible in iTunes "because the original file could not be found", which makes sense because the original HD is gone. Is there a method of having iTunes search my backup HD to find the song location? Can it automatically run this search and re-build the file pointers for all 4,000 songs?
It's been nearly a week without a reply. Is my situation hopeless for recovery? Is there any way that I can use my iPod, which has ~90% of my songs on it, to re-establish the correct pointers to my music library?
I had the same issue when my external harddrive crashed; I had my music backed up on a thumbdrive, but iTunes was looking in the wrong location.
What I did to solve the problem was just change the drive letter on my thumbdrive to the one my external HD had been using. Now, I think this only works if the data on the backup drive is in the same location as it was on the original drive, so if the path to the files is different I'm not sure if it will work. If you right-click a song that iTunes can't find and choose "Get Info" you'll be asked if you want to locate the song; I think you can only do this one song at a time though, and if you have 4,000 songs that would be pretty useless.
Your best bet is to change the backup drive's drive letter to the old HD, as long as the data is in the same location. Here's the process for Windows XP:
1. Log on as Administrator or as a member of the Administrators group.
2. Click Start, click Control Panel, and then click Performance and Maintenance.
3. Click Administrative Tools, double-click Computer Management, and then click Disk Management in the left pane.
4. Right-click the drive, the partition, the logical drive, or the volume that you want to assign a drive letter to, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.
5. Click Change.
6. Click Assign the following drive letter if it is not already selected, click the drive letter that you want to use, and then click OK.
7. Click Yes when you are prompted to confirm the drive letter change.
If that doesn't work I'm not sure what else you can do besides deleting all the info and re-importing your entire library at the new location, but you'll lose all your playcount and rating info, and if you manually changed any info for your songs before you'll have to redo it all. Hopefully someone else will have a better solution to the problem if changing the drive letter doesn't work!
Thank you for the tip Bea. I followed the steps that you suggested, and it worked! I lost my ratings and playlists, but it's small inconvenience. Thanks for the suggestion.
