iTunes library

[Toby Goodbar]

SMART status gave me a failing warning and I had no extra drives. So I shut down my iMac and went out and bought an external drive and an SSD. I already have one external where I keep all my media, iTunes included.

So what I did was cloned that media drive to the new external drive.
Following that (which is probably where I made my mistake by not repointing iTunes to the new external drive) I cloned my failing HD to what WAS the original media drive. (Why not to the SSD? Cuz the SSD had to be ordered by mail and I wanted to get everything backed up ASAP)

So what I have right now is a new external media drive (with my iTunes music), a failing internal OS drive, and an external clone of said OS drive.

The boot drive is still the failing drive for the time being. When I launch iTunes it can't find library and wants me to find it manually. The closest thing i found was an iTunes database that had been modified the last day i shut her down. But it "updates the library" and when i check the track listings its missing MOST of everything even though the music files are in the folders.

I made a backup of the parent folder with the DBs and ITLs in it so that if something went wrong i could just over write them. I tried some other ITLs but no dice. These things are all over the place!

Can anyone help me get this working right so that when I get the permanent drive in I'll be good?

Sorry to be so wordy. Just trying to be clear

 

[Toby Goodbar]

So this is another one those time when i could figure out my problem before getting some help so i'd like to share my solution for those looking in the future that may have a similar issue

First I trashed the corrected dated library file and moved the xml file to the desktop then opened iTunes. iTunes opens w.out asking for a lib ray at which point i made sure to direct it to the new media drive and folders.

Then used the "add to library" command from the menu and added the iTunes xml file i had put on the desktop. It took a long time but when it was done all the music was back… with one minor problem. all the date added info was for today. to me that was unacceptable.

Eventually i came upon a solution. I noticed that when choosing to option click iTunes to choose a library it wasn't actually letting me select the library. It wasn't selectable and i was just forcing it by repeatedly doubling clicking on it till it did something.

So what i did was drag it back out of the trash and add an ".itl" extension to it and then retried the option click opening of iTunes. Voila! it worked, everything restored with proper date added meta data etc! boom.