IPhone 3G refuses to sync music

Question

I have been unable to get any music onto my iPhone for the past week. I woke up one morning after leaving the iPhone plugged into my computer overnight to find that I had no music. When I plugged the phone in the night before everything was there as it should have been. I have tried restoring the iPhone multiple times. Deleted iTunes and reinstalled iTunes. Restarted my computer multiple times. I can play the music on my computer, so there is no issue there. I have also tried manually managing the iPhone, to no avail. Applications will sync but ringtones and music will not. I just started getting an error telling me that the iPhone could not be read or written to. I have taken the phone to the Genius Bar and they have successfully restored and uploaded music onto the phone. I'm completely perplexed.
It should be noted that I use an external drive for my iTunes folder. However, this hasn't effected me before this past week, at all. iTunes also now refuses to import music or play songs that I double click. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Since you seem busy or missed my question, I will just state my theory of what is happening.
You said you can play the songs but you didn't say if you are just going to the file to play or using iTunes.
I am going to assume you are not using iTunes to play the song. I am going to assume if you did try, iTunes is going to error on you saying it cannot find the file.
My theory is your external drive at some point recently got assigned a new drive letter. Thus to iTunes since it just stores pointers to files, it is looking at the old drive letter. Thus when you go to sync, it cannot find any of the files.
Go to iTunes and try to play a song that you are trying to sync. If iTunes errors saying it cannot find it, then I am right.
To fix, get your external drive drive letter set back to what it was before. Else you have to go to each song and either one by one tell it where the file is again, or remove all from your library and re-add them back so iTunes knows to update the pointers.
Drive letters can change under certain circumstances...example...you plug in drive and just accept the default drive it assigns. You later unplug and then at some point plug in a thumbdrive or card reader or something that thus gets the default drive letter and while still plugged in you pluged the external back in, thus it gets the next drive letter.
This theory will explain 1, why it won't sync to iPhone, 2, why it won't sync to iPod, 3, if your default library path in iTunes points to the old drive letter, it will explain why it doesn't auto import songs for you.
Message was edited by: DaVBMan