Sudden iTunes/External Hard Drive problem...

Greetings,
I've got a strange one... for a long time, we've successfully used an external USB hard-drive to store children's videos. The drive is connected to a Mac Mini (PPC) running 10.5.6. And the Mini is connected to a TV. We use cover flow to pick the video and off it goes, using an alias that's linked to the original file on the External HD. No problems.
Then last night, I dragged a few new TV episode downloads to the hard drive. The "copying" progress bar never showed, and then I couldn't get the HD's folders to show in the Finder. I tried running Disk Utility, but it said it "could not unmount" the drive. A couple of reboots later (with Shift Key down and after quitting some processes in Activity Monitor)... I was able to unmount the drives.
I ran Disk Utility repair and fix permissions on both partitions of the external drive, and all seemed okay again. Only, today the kids were midway through watching "Bolt" (from the iTunes store)... and it suddenly froze. At the same time, the audio coming from iTunes sounded like a shuddering loud rattle noise. It was definitely coming from the audio of the file, since I could turn it up and down using the volume in iTunes.
Once that happened, I could quit the fullscreen video but couldn't get any of the other movies on the HD to run. They would all do the same thing. The external HD seems fine, however. It reads as needing no repairs both when connected to the Mini and when connected to my Macbook Pro.
I also ran Cocktail on the Mini, clearing the caches, fixing permissions again, running the maintenance scripts, etc. (I ran it on autopilot). Even rebooting after this didn't help. The video still freezes. And no, not always in the same spot.
Anybody have any ideas about what could be causing this?

Hi there,
I guess you're using 8.1?
I couldn't play songs anymore after the 8.1 update.
After switching off iTunesDJ (General Preferences) it could find my library again,
but it still functioned VERY s l o w l y. In the end I went back to v7.7.1. Now waiting for roy@apple to fix the problems with the 8.1.1 update.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Henk

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Yeah, I gave the new drive the letter Z, so there shouldn't have been any conflicts there. I also tried your other suggestion, and while the computer recognized my external hard drive, it didn't seem to make any difference once I plugged in the iPod again.
I've been wrestling with this for days now. I've tried changing the drive letters for both the external hard drive and my iPod several times (but no matter what, the iPod always seems to take F when it's unplugged and then plugged back in). I've tried restoring the iPod on multiple occasions. I've tried reinstalling all my USB drivers. I've consolidated my music library on several occasions (I now have two identical libraries on my external hard drive), yet annoyingly, iTunes seems to keep switching file paths away from the external hard drive and back to their original locations on the C drive. I'm trying to free up internal hard drive space, not house 30 gigs of media on it. That's what this new external hard drive is for.
Somehow, I was able to get them both to be recognized at the same time, but it never lasts long. I'll start iTunes with the external hard drive disconnected, plug in my iPod, wait for the iPod screen to come up in iTunes, then plug my external hard drive back in. Then, I can miraculously start to transfer music back onto my iPod, but iTunes doesn't seem to want this to happen for some reason, and will usually cut off the transfer. So far I've managed to put three whole songs on my iPod.
So now I'm trying to do two things. One, the same as before, get my computer and iTunes to recognize both my iPod and my external hard dive at the same time. And two, get iTunes to stop changing the file paths back to the C drive. These files are already on my external hard drive and don't need to change.
(As a side note, I should comment on how helpful people are on this discussion board. The Apple representitives I called on several occasions seemed totally unwilling to help, acting more like pushy salesmen than anything, while people here seem to be much more friendly and knowledgeable. Just thought it needed to be said.)
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Quit iTunes.
Move everything back where it was.
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Hi
I am trying to clean up room on my laptop and followed directions on how to move my iTunes music to an external hard drive.....I did that and they are on that hard drive, but when I open up iTunes on my laptop, nothing is there and none of my lists, favorites, etc. are listed, just blank. I need to find out how to change it back, and start over I suppose.....if anyone can help and explain it in a really basic way, I would really appreciate it.....
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Limnos wrote:
I believe it is shift key on Windows, option key on Macs.
Indeed you are correct!
Thanks for the correction, forgot I was in the Mac forum...
tt2

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If the library won't work when it has a different drive letter one approach would be to change settings in Windows disk managment to restore the original letter.
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tt2
Message was edited by: turingtest2

Lastest Update 10.4.3 & External Hard Drive Problems?

My problems started 2 days ago when I could not copy new music to my ipod shuffle. I kept getting error "...could not be read from or written to..." I had run the new ipod update 1.1.3 so I restored to factory settings and used previous updater 1.1.2. Seemed to be fine for the time being. Later I tried to import music from a CD, wouldn't import, same message. Tried to download a song from the Music Store, same thing.
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Perhaps this is my error.
Anyone else having external hard drive issues, please send your ideas my way...
thanks

I did install the combo update 10.4.3 again and it helped one of my drives. Luckily it's the one I use everyday with my iTunes, and iPhoto libraries and all my other important stuff. The second drive that's partitioned into 3 parts still had problems. One more partition came back bur the third part I just couldn't retrieve and had to blank it. I also had an issue with a corrupt iphoto library and had to rebuild my library.
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Hello I am a college student at RIT with a problem
Right now I have my itunes library on an external hard drive that I leave plugged into my laptop, my friend recently installed the software for remote time machine backups on a file server in his room. I want to find a way to plug my external hard drive into that server to do time machine backups and store my itunes library remotely so I can access them anywhere on campus
How would I be able to do this in the easiest manner
Thanks

You may find more help in the TM forum, here.
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1227

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This is a story about my external hard drives and my macbook pro. Some time ago, I moved my itunes music folder with all of my songs and movies consolidated to it onto external hard drive #1, but kept my itunes organizational data on my macbook pro's internal hard drive. Life was good. I had more internal hard drive space on my macbook pro then ever because all my songs and movies were gone, and itunes worked flawlessly as long as hard drive #1 was connected.
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This should work:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449?viewlocale=en_US
BE AWARE THOUGH:
I followed these steps and had a strange issue come up. I don't think it was at all related following the steps above. But just double check your music BEFORE you throw out any of the music from you computers hard drive.
Here's what happen.
Some of my music forgot what file type they were. I had some that decided to be plist others jpg others something else. It was totally random. And a HUGE pain to replace the music. But I worked through it.
Hope that helps.

Itunes & external hard drives

Does anyone know if it would be possible to run Itunes on an external hard drive connected to a laptop via USB 2.0 ie store all music and Itunes on the hard drive?
I have no more memory left on my computer and I was hoping this would be an option.

Yes you can tasty chick...I ran into the same problem, and so I picked up a SimpleTech 120 GB external hard drive.
The trick is you need to assign the external hard drive a specific drive letter each time it is plugged into your laptop (or when you reboot). If you don't do this, then the external drive may get a different drive letter each time it is plugged in. This can be done by following the steps listed in this article at Microsoft's site (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844)...assuming you have XP. If you don't have XP, search the site for the steps to follow for your operating system.
After that, just follow the steps from this Apple.com article about how to move your iTunes music folder (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305451).
Once you're done you should be able to fill up that iPod bad boy!
Hope this helps,
Kiddka
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Another external hard drive problem

I'm sorry if this topic has been brought up before, but I did a search and could not find anything that could relate to my problem.
I recently purchased an external 2.0 usb hard drive for my Windows XP Pro computer. iTunes was located under My Documents/My Music. In order to start making room for my internal hard drive, I moved all of the music under My Music to my external hard drive but was too afraid to move the iTunes folder. The folder is currently located under My Documents.
When I click on iTunes, iTunes does not start up. I re-installed iTunes's latest version to no avail. Is there any way to fix this problem?

Sounds to me like it's failed. You may be able to pull the drive from the enclosure and connect it using a SATA-USB adapter. If the drive itself has failed, it may be possible to recover the data, but data recovery services are not cheap.

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Batlo wrote:
(Time machine said it needed 29 GB for full backup and the drive had 32 GB free)
That's much too small for your backups. Time Machine usually needs 2-3 times the space of the data it's backing-up (see #1 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum).
I noticed that it had reached 2.3 GB and was not going any higher. I let it stay like that for about 5 minutes thinking that maybe it would start going again. No luck. I shut down time machine and saw a finder window with the progress bar behind it saying 2.3 GB.
That sounds like the drive is not formatted properly. See #C1 in the Start with the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
The other problems may have the same cause.
Most likely, it's set up for Windoze and not suitable for Time Machine. With only 32 GB free, you must have other data on the drive, so you probably can't erase it and reformat it for Time Machine.
Report back with your findings for the *Partition Map Scheme* and Format of the drive (per #C1), and we can figure out what to do next.

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Hi jwgoldsmith - welcome to the forum!
Are you sure that the external drive is formatted for Mac computers? It must be MAC OS EXTENDED, not FAT 32 or such. If you need to re-format, make sure you have saved important files to some other drive as re-formatting erases everything.

Itunes & external hard drive questions "original file could not be found"

I recently got my first apple, a Powerbook G4, and I am trying to figure out how to store and access my music files that are on my external hard drive. I have some music stored on my laptop and the majority of it on the hard drive. I can play the files on my computer's hard drive(itunes finds them), but the files on the external hard drive will not play, unless i seek it out manually. The message says "the song could not be played because the original file couldn't be found. Would u like to locate it" My question is how to get the files in my library to play when they are stored on my external hard drive. Any advice would be appreciated.

There's something missing in your explanation. If you're getting the "original file..." message, that would indicate that you may have had all your music files on your laptop drive at one point and them moved some of them to the external drive without using the proper procedure.
If you don't have a lot of playlists, star ratings, and that sort of information that you're trying to preserve, then Mike's suggestion is an easy way out. If you do have a lot of that kind of information, then you may need to see if you can restore your setup to its former condition, when it was all working, and then use proper procedures to move files to the external drive or whatever it was that you were trying to do.

MacBook hard drive transform into an external hard drive problem

My macbook pro early 2008 just died. The mother circuit fried and well its not usuable anymore and the repair for it are like 900$. Having alot of data in my macbook hard drive , i ask the guy that work at the genius bar to take out of macbook hard drive.
then i install the hard drive in a enclosure kit to transform it into a portable external hard drive. My problem is:
It only read the Window partition info and doesnt even give the choice to view my Mac partition.
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ITunes + external hard drive + iPod movies = headache. Help?

Hey folks,
I'm in need of some assistance. In theory, this should work just fine. But iTunes and I have a history and it's not cooperating again.
Present setup:
-Macbook (with a hard drive that is almost full)
-Music is saved on Macbook
-All is well
What I want the setup to be:
-Brand new WD 500 GB External hard drive
-An iTunes folder has been created on the external drive
-All my music was copied from my laptop to the external drive into the iTunes folder
-iTunes was updated with the new location
-Everything is fine UNTIL I unplug the hard drive, at that point iTunes resets itself to the Macbook folder. When I plug the external drive back in I have to reset the preferences to that location again and it updates my iTunes library - which is a pain to say the least.
It gets slightly more complicated at this point ... I'm in the midst of moving roughly 60 movies onto my iPod. I have a folder on my external drive named "iPod Movies." I was able to transfer 27 movies onto my iPod just fine last night. Now, when I transferring movies into iTunes I get this error, "Attempting to copy to the disk "My Book" failed. The disk could not be read from or written to."
Basically, I want my external drive to be my iTunes/iPod drive and it certainly is not working that way. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

Set your folder structure on the ext HD to mimic what is on your Mac - iTunes>iTunes Music> etc - then make sure that the iTunes Library and .xml files for the library are on the ext HD. Then when opening iTunes hold down the 'Option' key and direct iTunes to the ext HD.
MJ

Sudden iTunes/External Hard Drive problem...

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