Deleted Itunes Library issue - help!

shabbyalonso

Hi guys,
I hope I'm in the right spot and many thanks in advance for any help that you can give me.

Laptop is/was fairly jammers, according to the C: drive therefore I decided to move my itunes onto an external hard drive that I have. The contents of my itunes is about 22gigs. Anyway, googled the ways to do it and managed to find a video tutorial which was quite straight forward.

Firstly, with Itunes open, I changed the path whereby songs etc were stored to i.e. under preference, I changed the source/location from "my music" on my laptop, to the external drive.
Secondly, on itunes again, I went file, library and consolidated my itunes library. It took about an hour for the whole thing to be done, no problems so far.

Opened up my external hardrive and could see all the files copied across. The last bit of advice from the video tutorial was that if you were happy with the result, you could free up the space on your laptop/internal drive by deleting your itunes library which is now on your external drive.

So, I went ahead and did just that - went into "my music" folder and deleted the Itunes folder (which was, as said, about 22gigs). It said it was too big for the recycle bin so do you want to delete permanently - I clicked yes.

I then loaded up itunes (the icon on my desktop) and it loaded up but didn't show anything - I thought it would take the info from the new location, i.e. external drive, as it was still connected to the laptop. I did read something about when you don't have the external drive connected, itunes would still save your new uploads but wouldn't transfer properly to the folder until you re-connected your external drive.

Anyway, the position I'm in now (hopefully you're still with me) is that I don't know why the itunes is showing up empty?
I read on a website that when you load up itunes by clicking the icon, do so while holding the shift key - it will ask then to choose library. I do that, go into the external drive and it shows where I've saved the files to but there's no mention of a library.

As an attempt, I loaded up itunes, went to file and add folder to library - I copied files back from the external hardrive and they transferred over. When done, I disconneted the external drive, and loaded up itunes again but it was empty!

Anyone have any pointers they can give me, experience of doing this or anything they can tell me.

I'm afraid that I went and deleted my "my music" itunes folder a bit prematurely. Computers drive me bonkers (that's just a little side note!).

Cheers for reading guys

guil

did y actually copy the files, ya dont say so in your post, ya should of just right clicked on the my music folder and then send to x drive

shabbyalonso

Hi Guil,
Well, via itunes, I have copied all the itunes file to the x drive. They are on the x drive at present. It's just that I think I went and deleted some itunes directory file? from my laptop hard drive and when I load up itunes, even with the x drive is connected, nothing shows.
It might be a case that I need to get some recovery program to re-instate that "permanently deleted" folder, possibly?

Prenderb

might be worth trying recuva. It's free.
http://www.piriform.com/recuva

coolmoose

Your iTunes library and the actual media/music folders are a different thing altogether. Your iTunes library consists of a .itl database file and an xml file, which are normally located at My Music>iTunes. These tells iTunes where to find each individual song/album etc. You've deleted these when you deleted the entire iTunes folder, so iTunes can't actually find a library to add the files to, hence why you're not seeing anything when you add the folders.

I can't think of a quicker solution to this other than uninstall iTunes, reboot, and reinstall iTunes. Then try adding the folders on the external drive back again...and be sure to change your preferences in iTunes for the location of the media folders before you do this!

HTH!

shabbyalonso

Hi guys,

So as to update - thanks for the ideas by the way.
I've managed to sort it....somehow! To be honest, I'm not quite sure how but I managed to get itunes working while connected to the ex drive, as hoped. I've cleared out the C drive of itunes so I've lots of room now on the laptop internal drive. All is working as it was before, but now speaking to the ex drive. I did lose some apps but have just downloaded them again.
Job done - as said, not 100% sure how, but job done nonetheless! Cheers