ITunes can't find any of my music

I've been using iTunes for a long time now. I keep all my music on an external (portable) drive with the exception of podcasts or downloaded music from the store. All of a sudden iTunes can't find any of my music. Everytime I click on a song to play that is stored on that drive I get the "!" mark and a box that says itunes couldn't find the song, do I want to search for it. I really don't want to have to do that to all 3k songs. My drive is fine, the songs are there. Could my library file have been currupted? This every happen to anyone else?

Do what Katrina says and that will most likely fix it.
Usually, when this happens, it's because a new device has been added via USB, like even a thumb drive.
When windows boots up, it assigns drive letters to the external devices. If it does it out of order from what it used to do, that effectively changes the location of your music files.
So if you've added anything to your computer via a different USB port, try taking that out. Of course you'd have to reboot after that.
But the permanent solution is what Katrina says, but you might need more detailed instructions on how to achieve what she says.
Look at the XML file to see what the drive is supposed to be. Open My Computer and match it with what your external harddrive is. If they don't match, there's your answer.
Once you fix that, your exclamation marks will disappear; you don't have to re-import or anything silly like that.

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I moved all my music from c: drive(because it was full) to an external harddrive and now itunes can't find any of my music. Is there a way to get Itunes to find music on external drive without having to place all the music back onto the c: drive? Thanks

I moved all my music from c: drive(because it was full) to an external harddrive and now itunes can't find any of my music. Is there a way to get Itunes to find music on external drive without having to place all the music back onto the c: drive? Thanks

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Failing that, download and run my FindTracks script and point it at the new location of your media folder.
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ITunes suddenly cannot find any of my music (but I see it!!)

So all of my music (the entire library, including the library and xml files) are sitting on an external USB 2.0 drive, in this location:
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See this post.
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UpperFilters: GEARAspiWDM (2.0.6.1),
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Do what Katrina says and that will most likely fix it.
Usually, when this happens, it's because a new device has been added via USB, like even a thumb drive.
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kenfromoshawa wrote:
I keep losing music from my library because "itunes cannot locate original file". Why does my computer lose this?
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Try:
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ITunes can't find any of my music

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