Data corruption on external drive

[bram2000]

Hi,

I have a Western Digital MyBook Studio eddition 750Gb plugged, via USB, into a MacMini (10.5.6). I store my whole music collection (~100Gb) on this drive, and a little while back, started to have trouble playing certain songs from within iTunes. iTunes would not error, it would just refuse to play the track. It then refused to play a long mix, which I had listened to from the very same source the previous day. I copied the same mix back from my laptop and diff'd the two. They where indeed different. If I run "file" on them both, sure enough, the working one reports "MP3 blah blah ...", the broken one "data". I have ran a find over the entire livrary and discovered that about 20% of the tracks are now reported to be "data". Whats more, the corrupted tracks seem to be in groups (entire albums or several albums by same artist etc.).

I'm assuming this is a hard drive fault, but I have run every check in both "Disk Utility" and "Diskwarrior", and no problems are reported.

Can anyone shed any light on what might be going on here, or offer me any advice on how to debug further?

Thanks,

Jon

 

[Satcomer]

first go into your iTunes preferences and when the preferences popup then click on the "advanced" button. There in that window make sure your iTunes points to the correct location. Once you close the preferences window in iTunes menu item 'File', select Library and do a "Consolidate Library" and let it run until finished. This well re-associate your iTunes Music Library to the correct location.

 

[bram2000]

Thanks, but I don't think that's going to help me. The files have always been organised by iTunes, hence are already in the correct place, the files are simply unplayable by iTunes (and any other media player for that matter) as the data inside them has become corrupted.