I need emo music. But I don't have any.
March 26, 2011 9:48 PM   Subscribe

Posted for a friend: iTunes went apeshit, drive has been emptied of music. WTH?

Older Windows XP laptop. Many-thousand-song /Music folder has disappeared, along with all old itunes libraries, etc.

Where did it go, and can we get it back?

Google reveals a lot of rigamaroll, most of which has to do with people whose library files got corrupted but the music files were untouched. This is not the case. The actual music is gone as well.
posted by iarerach to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)
 
If you use a directory other than the default, iTunes will sometimes reset itself to look in its default folder. That is, is the folder really gone off the hard drive, or is it just that iTunes appears empty?
posted by rhizome at 10:27 PM on March 26, 2011


Response by poster: iTunes was importing music to its default folder and auto-managing it.

Trash has been checked and is empty.

The music on her phone has disappeared as well, so I'm testing a theory.
posted by iarerach at 10:41 PM on March 26, 2011


Response by poster: Phone issue was a false alarm. Showing hidden files and folders (a long shot, I know, but it happens) on the laptop produced nothing. Any suggestions are still appreciated at this point.
posted by iarerach at 10:56 PM on March 26, 2011


What was your friend doing when this happened?
posted by fshgrl at 11:08 PM on March 26, 2011


Shut the laptop down. Pull the drive. Put it in an external USB enclosure and take it to a working Windows box, upon which you have installed ZAR. After recovering all the deleted folders, run chkdsk over the drive to make sure the only thing wrong with it was deleted files; if so, you can safely transfer them all back from the ZAR machine onto the laptop's drive.
posted by flabdablet at 12:09 AM on March 27, 2011 [4 favorites]


Be sure when searching your drives, that you enable searching for hidden and system files under the advanced search options. You can also search for mp3s via a CMD prompt by typing the following:

c:
cd\

dir /s /a *.mp3

-or-

dir /s /a *.mp3 >> c:\mp3files.txt
notepad c:\mp3files.txt
posted by samsara at 10:47 AM on March 27, 2011


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