Itunes can't access the external hard drive that I have been using for years. what happened?

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Itunes can't access the external hard drive that I have been using for years. what happened?

I transfered all of our music, audiobooks etc. to an external hard drive a couple years ago and its always worked flawlessly. Today when I tried to sync one of our ipods it told me that it couldn't find any of the tracks. I suspect that the more I try to fix it the worse I am making things..... I've tried going into edit>preferences>advanced and changing the 'itunes media folder location'- in fact I've tried every location I could think of (the external drive, the itunes folder on the internal drive...), repeatedly, and it still fails.

help!

Windows XP

Posted on May 5, 2012 3:58 PM

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Answer 1

wiclee

Level 5

6,992 points

May 5, 2012 6:04 PM in response to ajstay

If your iTunes had lost track of your music file location, you may find all the songs in Itunes music library to precede with an ! symbol.

If so, double click a song with ! mark on side, you will be given an option to locate the file where the song is held. Select "locate" and direct it to your external Drive folder / file where the song is and open it.

iTunes then will give you the option to use this process to update all of your library. OK that as this will do it automatically instead of doing them one by one.

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Answer 2

ajstay Author

Level 1

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May 6, 2012 3:43 PM in response to wiclee

I was hopeful, but this isn't working for me. It will locate the individual track when I direct it there, but can't use the location to locate other tracks. It seems like when I locate the one track I have to guide it through the whole drive to that one track, rather than tell it to look on that drive, or in the iTunes folder on that drive, or in the music folder within the iTunes folder on that drive. So when it looks for additional tracks, its just going to find that one track that I've already directed it to- does that make sense?

Also, I have hundreds of folders with dozens or hundreds of files in each folder (sorted by artist)..... Would it be better to relocate the whole library back onto the primary hard drive, then transfer it back, following the directions for relocating everything....? sigh.

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