Turingtest2, you are THE MAN! Your excellent post of step-by-step determination led to rapid resolution of my problem. In my case, after the disk checked out fine, 0 retracts and 0 reallocations, I went over to batch transfers of about 250 songs at a time. Problem solved. Thank you VERY MUCH!
That said, three observations:
- A post on another website taught me to create a playlist in iTunes on my desktop and copy all of my music to the playlist. This does not transfer any 'missing link' entries (as indicated in the ! column) to the playlist. I then transferred from that playlist to the main folder on my iPod in smaller batches, which worked without a flaw.
- This problem WAS a consequence of my updating to the latest version of iTunes. I say that with certainty now because I was able to transfer my entire iTunes folder to the same iPod in one step four separate times using several previous versions of iTunes without incident. First, when my iPod was new, once when I was moving all my Holiday music to my 8 GB Nano, and once after my C: drive crashed on the desktop and was replaced, and once recently when I moved my iTunes folder to a larger hard drive that was not the root drive. Four for Four. But update to the latest version of iTunes and under the new version the bulk transfer fails. (As The Fiend pointed out in this thread, the iPod software had not changed.)
- I have done enough C++ and JAVA programming to know a software problem when I hit one. This problem is a glitch, not a 'feature'. But your work-around worked splendidly.