[rainydaygirl]

Hi, I've had this problem for a while now, and can't find much help from Google, so I'm hoping you guys can help!

I keep my music on an external hard drive, mostly cause I have a lot of it. My iTunes runs fine when the hard drive isn't connected, but the minute the hard drive is attached it starts processing the library and crashes. In the past I've tried keeping track of the song it was on before it crashes and moving it, but it continues to crash (often on songs it previously happily processed).

It worked before I imported one album - I have deleted said album (obviously, it was the first thing I did) but this didn't solve anything. I had the same problem just over a year ago, and found a solution but am unwilling to do it again, since it corrupted quite a few of the files in my library (they would play, but they would skip or freeze). I'm also unable to find said solution...

The Apple website suggested going through each file individually. That just isn't going to happen; I have way, way too much (although, of course, if it's the only solution, I guess I'll have to.) I've tried creating a .bat file as they suggest and that doesn't fix the problem.

I'm running WindowsXP, if that helps ^^;;

Any help is appreciated so so so so much!

Kate

[parasolution]

have you ran a check disk (CHKDSK) on the external drive. Have you defragmented the drive? Have you uninstalled iTunes and reinstalled?

When you say iTunes runs fine when the drive isn't attached, what do you mean. If all the songs are on the external, all the music on iTunes would have exclamation marks next to them, as it couldn't find the song since the drive is not connected.

[rainydaygirl]

I haven't run a check-disk - how do I do that? Thank you

Uninstalling and reinstalling does nothing, and it's been defragged.

When I say it works fine, I mean it'll play any music I have on the hard drive, download any podcasts etc. When I've left it on, as it were, it just skips the missing files, so there are the exclamation marks for the ones it can't find.

[parasolution]

How is the hard drive connected, USB or Firewire. If its USB, is the port on your computer a USB 2.0 port? If its a USB 1.1 port, it will run really slow, especially if you've got a lot of songs. Also, how much memory do you have? I have a library of over 20,000 songs, iTunes loaded really slow when I only had 1GB of memory.

As for checkdisk. go to My Computer and right click on your external drive and go to Properties. Click on Tools and go to Error Checking. Click on the Check Now button.

[rainydaygirl]

The problem is kinda solved; in that my external died completely, so now there isn't an issue...or any music x.x Thanks for your help, though!