I keep iTunes on an external drive. Have not backed it up recently so of course had a problem yesterday. Was downloading the free Tiger Woods golf games. Long download, went for a walk, and something went stupid. Don't know if the house power fluctuated, but the computer would not recognize the drive and wanted to format it. No, No, No.
Was fairly certain the drive was not bad but that some "bit" in a file or the index of the drive was wrong. In the old days you could often find and fix the file error with various DOS tools and a hex editor. So spent several hours, cursing self for delaying the backup and searching the internet for solutions. Lots of places wanted to sell you a $50-100 program to recover the data. Kept searching.
The computer could see the drive in the drive listings, but clicking on it said it needed formatting. That wouldn't really wipe out my iTunes but the drive would think it was empty and would still takes lots of effort to see and recover the data. Kept looking for something better.
Finally found a discussion and the recommendation to run some command line commands.
In the Start box type with no quote marks, "run" [enter] another box opens, type "cmd". You will see the black old DOS screen.
Type "chkdsk d:/x/r" and [enter] --d: is letter of the bad drive. It actually was drive "I" on my computer.
chkdsk will run.
Took a long time and showed some errors being corrected. After over an hour it appeared to hang at step 4 of 5, trying to verify each file. At about 9000 of 45000 files. Closed and ran chkdsk again. Ran quicker as the earlier errors were gone, still hung at the same file. Darn.
Shutdown the computer and rebooted. When it came back up it showed the external drive and clicking on it showed the iTunes folder and other folders on the drive. All was well and I immediately backed up the drive to another drive. Perhaps if I'd let chkdsk run all night it might have finished verifying, but in this case it had already repaired the bad index or file.
For info -on the Vista laptop used the free sync program FreeFileSync. Windows 7 used AllWay Sync.
Moral: Backup your data
