itunes not working

[bigdjf4e]

i am using the current version of itunes everything was going fine...until itunes stopped working...i use an airport extreme with airdisk for my itunes collection to be on the network so i dont have 120 gigs of music taking up space on my hard drive...when i try to open up itunes it says that it cant read this ~ sign and therefore cant open...have tried uninstalling itunes including the preference files in the library so far no luck...i just downloaded a new cd from umphreys mcgee and really wanna listen to it on my nice new studio monitors

help

any ideas?

 

[Satcomer]

Well that sign is the sign for you Home folder (YourHardDrive/Users/YourUserName/=Your Home folder). This is an indication of either a massive program failure or the start of a hard drive failure. Either way I surely hope you have a back up handy ASAP!!!!

Now it is time to run some maintenance on your Mac (which SHOULD be dome on a regular basis). Download the either free/donationware maintenance program Yasu or Onyx and run all the cleaning routines. The program will them reboot your Mac but immediately reboot again to rebuild your startup/shutdown procedures.

Then see if that fixes things. If it doesn't try to reset iTunes by going to /YourHardDrive/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/ and delete the file com.apple.iTunes.plist (make sure you Quit itunes before doing this).

If that doesn't work then it is time to pray you have a backup because that hard drive might be dying! To check use your install disk and use Disk Utility (included on all OS X install disks) to check the internal disk. If it gives errors, replace it and clone back from you cloned backup!

See now why having a cloned backup is very important (hint: use th free program Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable backup to a firewire external)!