WHEN RESTORING BACKUP OF ENTIRE LIBRARY, NOT ONE PLAYLIST HAS RESTORED!

my harddisk developed an unrepairable corruption, and i had to completely reformat and fresh install my operating system. I was able to backup my entire library onto 9 dvds (37 gig), but when restoring, the music rstored without problems, but horror of horrors not one playlist has appeared... this is terrible! Please help me anyone who can tell me how to rescue them. Is it necessary to restore the discs in a particular order? i.e. the last dvd first to be inserted for restore, or are the playlists somewhere on one of the dvds in a file? please please help.

I had this same problem. I just bought an aluminum iMac, and needed to transfer my music from my old Windows PC. I did the backup to DVD thing, and then followed the restore instructions to copy it onto the iMac. Everything got transferred perfectly, except for the playlists. Since I didn't want to redo them all, I got a little crafty and it worked!
1) Do the backup/restore, etc, according to the instructions here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302392.
To get your playlist, etc....
2) Quit all the way out of iTunes.
3) Go into the music folder and rename the "iTunes Library" file to something else. (I picked iTunes Library-old). Make sure this is the "iTunes Library" one, NOT the "iTunes Music Library" one.
4) Find the "iTunes Library.itl" file on your backup CD/DVDs. Do not run the restore again. Click cancel if the dialog box pops up asking if you want to restore.
5) Copy that file into the folder from step 3.
6) Start up iTunes, and you should see all your playlists
7) You will likely have a lot of files with an "!" next to them, so you will have to have iTunes "find" each of them.
-phae
Message was edited by: phaedre
Message was edited by: phaedre

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Message was edited by: JSSAUCE for spelling errors

Hi JS,
I'm assuming that you simply want to move all of your music from one library to the other and operate iTunes ONLY from THAT library. If this is the case then follow these steps..
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Hope this helps you achieve what you desire..
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nutdrum wrote:
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