I have been using iTunes for a few years with my external harddrive (250GB Western digital) as the storage. I have never had any problems.

Yesterday I copied 40GB of new music into my itunes folder (g: music).

I then added the contents of my g:music to my library. This usually finds any new files and brings them into my library.

The process took a couple of hours - including reorganisation, bringing in new album artwork and determining gapless playback.

After it had finished the following happened:

1. Many of the new song and others I had appeared with an exclaimation mark and wouldnt play
2. I clicked to find their location. In my g: music folder the artist directory appeared but the files inside were all in chinese/japanese writing.
3. I exited iTunes and checked the contents of the music folder using explorer. The same happened - with the chinese writing.
4. I shut down my computer and restarted.
5. As windows XP began it said it must check my external drive for consistency.
6. It then began to tell me that there was certain errors in my external drive and it converted folders to files.
7. I stopped this process as it reached 20% by clicking the power button on my laptop.
8. I restarted my laptop without my harddrive in.
9. The harddrive now shows around half of my artists as 32kb files instead of entire directories (most that used to have other album directories inside) and many music files. Instead of all the music files and folders and the artist folder simply appears one 32kb file (file type simply says file).

Note: I had 220GB of music on this drive. The drive still states that it has 220GB of data on it. But when I click properties on my music folder it counts only 95GB.

Does anyone know of anything I can do??

Many thanks in advance.

Adam

Do the following processs

1. Run check disk
For example, your external drive is E in wiindows explorer (Either pen drive....etc )
c:>chkdsk E: /R

This will fix most of your Issues.

2. Windows Security Issue.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/810881

If these two don't work, run any Diagnostic tools (Westernal digitl) which comes with External hard cd.

Thanks for the reply. Not sure you fully read my issue though.

The microsoft issue isnt really related. The checkdisk will make all the remaining folders into unreadable files - I'm not keen to do that.

Any other advice from anyone?

Get another hard disk copy and copy the files onto the other disk. Then run chkdsk on the original disk or format it, and copy the files back.

Alternatively, restore the files from a backup (you do have a backup!) or download or re-rip the music again.

Or get a repair tool to fix the corrupted file system. E.g.
http://www.symantec.com/norton/syste...-basic-edition

Sorry to be short but If I had a backup I think I might not have wasted anyones time asking for help!

Thanks. I'll get to work on downloading and ripping 34,000 tracks. I'll give you a shout when I'm done in 2012.

Hi -

I'm having the same problem did you ever get a solution?

I'm not sure but I think this problem may have started when I changed my import settings and/or started using my iphone with itunes - did you do anything similar? Also sometimes this error won't happen but the majority of the time it does.

Cheers - Alex