well as i now have a decent laptop from work i decided to transfer all my music onto my external harddrive from my old laptop. Im giving that to my son.

I did that no bother then i deleted my account and all of my files from the old laptop so now there is nothing on it from my previous account.

Problem. i went to transfer all my music from my external drive to my new laptop so i can set up my itunes only to find that most of the folders are empty. They are there with the album artwork but no music.

Now the music folder i transfered was around 10 gigs and the space taken up on the external drive is still 10 gigs but how can it be if all the music is gone. Or is is.

For some reason are they hidden. Help!!

Control panel>folder options>view> dot the option "show hidden files and folders.

See what comes up?

nope i tried that and it didnt work. How can transferring all my files make them disappear.

You can right click on directories and select properties to enable you to drill down to where the the space is being taken up….

or just do a search for MPEG4 files…

sorry to clarify, it sounds like you might have moved the files to somewhere you didn't expect, this will help you track them down.

I'd phone Steve Jobs and ask him why iTunes and the iPod is such a restrictive pile of crap, but that's just me…

crikey – Member

I'd phone Steve Jobs and ask him why iTunes and the iPod is such a restrictive pile of crap, but that's just me…

I was gonna say something along the same lines, but that won't fix this problem. I always firmly recommend buying music on CD. That way you will always have a hardcopy and get decent quality audio, not a fraction of the original audio files! With a CD you choose the quality and format of recording.

There is recovery software for the deleted files on your old laptop (just google delted file recovery). You must run this s/w immediately after deleting otherwise those deleted files are at risk of being overwritten.

If your files contained DRM tags, this may be why they didn't copy to the ext. drive. Again, get CD's and set iTunes to rip without DRM.

Apple Corp. really sucks! People still get seduced by the fantastic looks and UI. I too find myself attracted to these, but I just can't get my head round the incompatitbility issues, the lack of replaceable battery and things like being fleeced an additional £120 if just I want a player with an additional 8mb of storage! Why can't we have removable storage and replaceable batteries? Reason: profit! Apple treat their customers like rubbish, yet still people buy these products! I just don't get it. "Fashion victims" I conclude.