Data recovery and iTunes music libraries

[Bert Latamore]

I am having a real problem with my iTunes music library, and I need advice particularly on data recovery tools. Moire and I keep separate libraries on an external SATA drive attached to our Windows XP desktop. Saturday morning Moire opened iTunes and her library was not there. She called Apple and ws told it was a "glitch", and she was given a procedure for locating all music files on the ssytem and copying them back into her library. That took all weekend.

This morning I got curious about all this. So I started the big computer (we don't use it all the time) and read the SATA drive manually, by opening the Start menu, clicking on "My Computer" and then on the drive letter. Both of our music libraries were clearly there, and I opened each of them to confirm that.

Then I opened iTunes under my image on the system. IT told me that my music library was on a locked disk or one that I do not have write access for. That didn't make sense. When I checked the library manually again it had disappeared.

So I do not know what happened there, but I am sure that the entire library was not wiped from the disk in a split second. I hope to be able to recover it therefore. Can anyone recommend the correct procedure and tools for doing this? Does XP have data recovery tools built in? I have not had a problem like this in a dozen years and don't remember what I did previously.

I also plan to do a backup of the SATA. I have three of them, so I plan to connect two through the computer and do a straight copy of the one onto the other ujnless there is a better approach.

Also, has anyone else run into this problem or heard anything about this kind of thing with iTunes? Do I have a virus here? Or has Apple sent out an update with some bad code in it? It appears that we suddenly cannot use iTunes, which is a major problem for us.

Thanks for your expertise and help. This is a problem I need to solve, and I don't know what is going on here.

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Bert Latamore
IT Industry Freelance Writer
ComputerWorld Online blogger