Help with iTunes on new PC

Question

Hello, I am having great problems with iTunes and would appreciate any help. This is what happened,
1) I had a virus on my laptop so I backed up only music, photos and videos onto HDD
2) The way I backed up iTunes library was by moving the whole iTunes library folder onto the HDD
3) I formatted the laptop
4) I moved the iTunes folder back into the virus free laptop
5) Installed iTunes and all the music, podcast, audiobooks are there with my ratings, play counts etc.
..but..
6) There is a next to every song, which will require me to go through the whole 3000 songs locating them.
So my question is...is there a way of batch locating them?
Or is there any other way?
HP Pavilion   Windows XP Pro  
HP Pavilion   Windows XP Pro  

Answer 1

It sounds as though you are on the right track whith what you did.
Can you confirm that you copied the following folder onto the external HDD:
...My Documents\My Music\iTunes
And also that this folder contained all your music etc.
When you've done that we can decide exactly what to do, in the meantime here is some genreal inforamtion
What you should have done is installed iTunes first, then with iTunes closed, you drag the iTunes folder, which will be pretty empty at this stage, out onto your desktop. Then you copy the iTunes folder from the external HDD into My Music to replace the orginal.
The process is explained in this apple link although it uses an iPod to transfer the iTunes folder rather than an external HDD.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300173
This process breaks down if some of your stuff was not in the iTunes folder. This is becuase iTunes stores the full path to your music files. The full path will be something like:
c:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Music\iTunes
Your username is part of the path and if your account name on the new PC is not identical with the old one, things go wrong. iTunes is clever enough to find things in the iTunes folder, but stuff outside, say in My Music, will not be found.