iTunes on External Hard Drive no longer recognizes music

[rexyrex]

I have 100gigs of music so I successfully transferred my iTunes media to an external hard drive, and identified this new location within iTunes/Preferences/Advanced/Location. Everything worked great until I had to shut down and start up.

Now, it no longer recognizes the media library. When I try to play a track in iTunes, iTunes says the original file could not be found. It prompts me to locate this one track, which I do, and that one track will play. All of the other tracks have the (!) sign next to them in my iTunes library.

I have double checked the settings in my iTunes preferences, everything appears to be configured as when I first made the successful transfer (identifying the external hard drive as the location).

I've made sure to restart once the external hard drive is connected.

Any ideas on how to regain access to my library on my external hard drive would be appreciated.

 

[GGJstudios]

Any ideas on how to regain access to my library on my external hard drive would be appreciated.

You could simply delete everything from your library and add it back, but, of course, you'd loose any playlists you have.

Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes is a great resource for managing your iTunes tags and files. They have several scripts for repairing broken links to tracks that might help. Just search there for "broken links" or "missing tracks".

 

[jimmykup]

I've recently run into a similar problem. I feel like one of the latest versions of iTunes 10 has introduced some kind of bug when working with the library and external drives. I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure it out.

 

[sfbayaprile]

I am really frustrated - since downloading itunes 10 my external hard drive is no longer recognized. it seems like the upgrade switched the directory back to my laptop hard drive. all the music is still on my external and when i try to change the location of the library nothing happens.

I don't want to uninstall everything and start over b/c i will lose all my playlists. this happened before 2 yrs ago and it sucked. my playlists are sitting there on itunes - isn't' there a way to save them in xls and then import them once you start over?

 

[GGJstudios]

I am really frustrated - since downloading itunes 10 my external hard drive is no longer recognized. it seems like the upgrade switched the directory back to my laptop hard drive. all the music is still on my external and when i try to change the location of the library nothing happens.

I don't want to uninstall everything and start over b/c i will lose all my playlists. this happened before 2 yrs ago and it sucked. my playlists are sitting there on itunes - isn't' there a way to save them in xls and then import them once you start over?

While your music files may reside on an external drive, your iTunes library files, which contain your playlists, is most likely on your internal drive, in your ~/Music/iTunes Libraries folder. Verify the location of both, make sure your external drive is properly mounted before your launch iTunes, and that your iTunes Media folder location is correct in iTunes > Preferences > Advanced. Hold the Option key while launching iTunes and select the proper library.

 

[Consultant]

I have ZERO problems running iTunes on external drive.

Did ran into a problem when the cable is dying. Replaced 7+ year old firewire cable and works perfectly.