Can't access my songs on external hard drive

Question

I recently replaced my HP Pavillion with a Dell. I stored all of my songs on an external drive. I installed iTunes on the new computer and set the appropriate path for where the songs are located. However, the songs will not show up on the libary. I downloaded two songs to see where they were located and they are in the same library.
I am afraid to connect my iPod for fear of losing the songs once it syncs.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Gonzo

Answer 1

iTunes doesn't scan for media automatcially. If you change the location of media files then iTunes will produce an error when you try to access them. If your library is empty, then that suggests your new installion is connected to a new empty library rather than the old library files. Depending on how your old computer was set up your iTunes library files may well have been in the default location, of My Documents\My Music\iTunes for the current user, even if you subsequently moved your media out to the external drive. If you still have access to the HP box you want to copy the iTunes folder from it into the equivalent location on the current machine (renaming/backing up anything it would replace) & then get iTunes to load the libray from that location. Otherwise you will need to get iTunes to rebuild the library by scanning the folders where your media now lives. Because iTunes stores some of it's organising info. in it's library rather than the media tags you will find that rebuilding your library won't rebuild your playlists, podcasts/audiobooks can end up in in the general music library and much of your album art will be missing.
tt2