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