Music files missing/hidden in folder on network hdd

Hi all,
I have setup my home net work with a iMac (mountain Lion) backed up by a TimeCapsule and at the back of the TimeCapsule I have a 2TB networked external HDD. My iTunes library is located on this HDD, I take care not to start up iTunes before this networked external HDD has propoerly mounted to avoid any conflicts with links to my itunes library files and folders.
The other day I noticed a few missing files (the dreaded exclamation mark !), not too bad a figured, I located a few manually but reached some that does my head in...... Out of the whole album there are two files "missing", the other ones play as they should. When I try and locate the missing files the folder comes up empty.....
I have even checked the songs that do play in the same album....they dont show up either, even though they still play in iTunes (yes, they are all located at the same location). The album was originally ripped from a CD and I don't use iTunes Match or Genius.
I have tried to find the files by:
1."open in finder" - files missing / whole folder empty
2."through finder and located the drive and folder" - files missing / folder empty
3."copy file location from "get info" and paste into "go to folder" - the file temporarily appears in the finder window but dissapears shortly after / folder yet again empty.
4. I check the folder "get info" from my finder and it says "zero bytes"
5. I can't use Search because its on an external HDD and there fore not indexed
6.I have tried to copy the folder to the desktop but still shows empty....
7. I have tried to "organise" my library, still no change.
What the..xxx..is happening..?
From what I can gather, the files are actually there but not visible through the finder window (even though the folder appears to be 0 bytes).
The problem being that I can't locate my missing files because I cant see them any more......
Am I missing something (like show hidden folder on a Mac) or has it got to do with anything else...? How can I fix it..? I have found posts that relate to windows users forced their W7 to show hidden folders but nothing yet on Mac.....
Help.
//Fred

I was lucky to be able to use a PC, that after trying numerous times actually read the external hdd, I quickly copied all files over to a backup hdd and recovered all files. After that I ended up in contact with Western Digital about the incident and they recommended to completely erase (7-pass erase) of the hdd, which ended up taking over 5 days to do. They gave me no reason as to "Why" it would have happened but if I erase and reformatted of the hdd and the problem reoccurred they recommended to get the unit replaced.
I was lucky to recover all my files.....keep trying on different computers if you can, and copy what you can get hold of. The 7-pass erase will delete pretty much every trace of information on the hdd with no chance of recovery.
So far since the incident its been running ok but I not longer trust the hdd to be stable. Not a simple nor quick process / solution I'm afraid.
Good luck!
Once you have recovered your files (or as many as you can get hold of) and ready to erase the hdd:
(THIS WILL ERASE ALL YOUR DATA, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP BEFORE PROCEEDING)
Connect the drive directly to the Mac, open Disk Utility.
Select the drive and click on the "Erase" tab Select the "7-times zeros" to completely erase the drive.
Once the erase have completed format the drive to your selection.

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Some music files missing in iTunes folder, yet work fine in iTunes

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I recently noticed that many of my music files are missing, and that the selection appears to be somewhat random. They are retained in iTunes, but have the ! next to them. So, doing the logical thing, I tried to locate them, and the files themselves are missing, but their iTunes link is preserved.
In an effort to continue to do the logical thing, I then systematically went through my CD library, re-loading all the missing material back into iTunes. This was extremely tedious, but appeared to fix most of the issues (obviously, the ones were the CD case was mysteriously empty were left unfixed). The files played fine at that time. Then I carried the computer upstairs to my home office, where I proceeded to plug it in to do a time machine backup on the newly transferred files.
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As other people who have experienced this problem previously have noted, there does seem to be a slight preference for songs whose artist and/or title include accented characters, although my detection ability is more limited now, as I have since lost many of these original CDs, and so the songs were not replaced within the library. But, while they account for about 5-10% of my overall library, they accounted for about 50% of the songs missing at the beginning of yesterday's overhaul.
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- The files are not there (they're not just hidden--I already checked for this).
- iTunes has retained the link to where it believes the file should be.
- The issue appears to have originally arisen quite some time ago, as these files are systemically missing from all backups made by time machine. However, it wasn't all that long ago that I deleted my entire library and started over (about 2 years, so the files should have been natively present on 2 of my macs) by re-importing all the files in my music folder. This newly created library has since become the "master" library that is propigated to all my other computers (although I don't trust iCloud for obvious reasons, given this fiasco--Thanks, Apple...)
- I have not elected to have iTunes manage my music folder, or automatically copy things to the iTunes music folder when importing (although this is the default destination, so they are imported there, but not duplicated there when imported from elsewhere on the hard drive).
- I am currently running OS X 10.6.8 on an Intel Mac (yeah, yeah, I'd upgrade the OS, but software that cost more than the computer isn't 10.8--or even 10.7--compatible).
If anyone has any thoughts on how to prevent this issue in the future, I'd really appreciate it. I think the music files themselves are just... gone. But, I would like to be able to have them stick around for a bit when I get around to dedicating another day to trying to import them from their CD.
Does anyone know a piece of third party software that allows you to sync and update iDevices? Hopefully one that doesn't take over my music library and decide to delete things of its own accord?

I was lucky to be able to use a PC, that after trying numerous times actually read the external hdd, I quickly copied all files over to a backup hdd and recovered all files. After that I ended up in contact with Western Digital about the incident and they recommended to completely erase (7-pass erase) of the hdd, which ended up taking over 5 days to do. They gave me no reason as to "Why" it would have happened but if I erase and reformatted of the hdd and the problem reoccurred they recommended to get the unit replaced.
I was lucky to recover all my files.....keep trying on different computers if you can, and copy what you can get hold of. The 7-pass erase will delete pretty much every trace of information on the hdd with no chance of recovery.
So far since the incident its been running ok but I not longer trust the hdd to be stable. Not a simple nor quick process / solution I'm afraid.
Good luck!
Once you have recovered your files (or as many as you can get hold of) and ready to erase the hdd:
(THIS WILL ERASE ALL YOUR DATA, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP BEFORE PROCEEDING)
Connect the drive directly to the Mac, open Disk Utility.
Select the drive and click on the "Erase" tab Select the "7-times zeros" to completely erase the drive.
Once the erase have completed format the drive to your selection.

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I suspect I know the answer to this already, but I hope I'm wrong! :-D
I have my macbook a while now, but I've only recently started using iTunes properly.
I have a home network, which consists of my macbook pro, a dell laptop running XP, a Nintendo Wii, a Sumvision Netbox NAS 1TB drive and a Logitech Squeezebox Boom.
I'm using the NAS as my music storage, iTunes rips music and stores it here.
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user1994506 wrote:
i am not able to find products.jar file while installing oracle 11gR2 on RHEL 4.0 as it is not their in zip file i have downloaded.
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Music files missing/hidden in folder on network hdd

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