Lost Folders on External Hard Drive

Hi all,
Today I tried to delete my time machine back up to free some space on my external hard drive. Unfortunately my mac would not delete the back up via Trash, so as a last resort I ran a terminal to locate the folder within my external hard drive and force delete it. I couldn't just delete the partition because i had lots of other stuff on the external hard drive.
After the terminal command was successful ,deleting only what was in the trash folder within my external hard drive, the back up was deleted. However at the same time three folders have disappeared from within my external hard drive all containing films i was storing. Strangely all three of the folders that appear to have been deleted had an asterisk infront of the folder name.
I can't figure out what has happened to them and how they were seemingly deleted. If anyone could shed any light on this issue i would be very grateful.

That's the cause of the problem.
The way you described it in your first post, makes me think the files could still be on your external HD.
The problem is, you moved the files without letting iTunes know.
The locations are stored in the 'iTunes Library' file (more info here).
If you move them using the Finder the links are lost.
You should have changed the 'iTunes Music folder' (Preferences>Advanced>General) to the music folder on your external HD and then use the 'Consolidate Library...' command from the Advanced menu in the menubar.
That copies all music to the 'iTunes Music folder' as set in the preferences.
It won't help now, but you can use this procedure next time.
It's also important to understand that when iTunes doesn't find the Library at startup, it will reset the 'iTunes Music folder' to the default location on the internal HD. Always connect your ext. HD before running iTunes.
Now to the possible rescue.
If the files are still on your ext. HD, you can use a script to restore the dead links.
Go to www.dougscripts.com and type 'dead' (without the quotes) in the 'search scripts:' field. Of the scripts that will be found, 'iTunes Track CPR v1.3' looks the logical choice to do the job.
Hope this helps.
M
17' iMac fp 800 MHz 768 MB RAM Mac OS X (10.3.9) Several ext. HD (backup and data)

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