After copying itunes to an external hd, itunes cannot find songs in library

Hi, welcome to Apple Discussions.

Which article? Post a link and it might be easier to guess where you could have gone wrong. Did you copy the files or move them? If you've moved them by accident you should be able to copy them back to where they used to live. Once you've fixed things here is my suggestion for backing up...

*Fast backup for iTunes library (Windows Only)*
Grab SyncToy 2.0, a free tool from MS. This can copy your entire iTunes library & any other media folders onto another hard drive or network share. You can then use SyncToy periodically to synchronise or echo your library to the backup. A preview will show which files need to be updated giving you a chance to spot unexpected changes and during the run only the changed files will be copied saving lots of time.

tt2

Windows should have taken a drag & drop from one drive to another as a copy operation. If the source and destination folders were on the same drive it would normally move. However it's possible with the right-click & drag options to do either copy or move on demand. Since a drag and drop move on the same drive is almost instantanous under XP (though not the useless Vista) it can be quite easy to accidentally move a folder without noticing. When you get properties for an item that iTunes can't find it rather unhelpfully declares the location as *Not Known*. It would be much more useful if is listed it as "Not found at <path>" where <path> was the last known locaton. Moving things back would then be fairly easy.

iTunes Folder Watch can be used to scan your iTunes folder looking for new files and spotting orphaned entries. I suggest you download the trial version of this and inspect the Dead Tracks screen - it may help you to work out exactly where things are missing from and hence what you might need to do to put them back in place. At this stage I don't think you want to use it to add any tracks or remove the dead ones as you would lose ratings etc. - you just want to see what's missing from where.

I too have had this problem. my boyfriend cut the songs instead of copying them and the external hard drive is now broken!is there any way at all of itunes giving me the songs back as i purchased most of them through the istore. please tell me you can i went into the store but the assisstant wasn't helpful and told me to report a problem which i cant find anywhere.

Greg, if you copied everything over to an exHD, try this.



Press *and HOLD* the shift key while starting itunes. You should get a prompt to creat a new library or choose an existing one. If you don't get the prompt, try again and *keep holding* that shift key.



Choose "existing" and browse to the exHD, Find the iTunes Library.ITL and open it. Is all you music linked properly in that library?