A few days ago I noticed that a whole load of music I had added to iTunes was marked as missing. In fact all of the music I had installed in the last week had gone west. I checked the folders for those artists in the iTunesmusic folder and it was not pretty. All of the file and folder names were corrupted. Had to think about this one. Later I noticed that a lot of other music had also been marked as missing and some of this music had been imported into iTunes ages ago. Again the music folders were a mess. Don’t panic. I thought about this for a few days and made a few stabs at searches for this kind of problem on Google but nothing obvious or easy popped up.

Then I had a eureka moment in that it was obvious the drive was screwed, hence all of the recent music not existing and as the drive was decaying before my eyes and then later on the other music disappearing. Oh good.

Now I do have regular backups of my iTunesmusic folder onto another drive, the K drive, and the last backup was the beginning of last week. The busted drive was the M drive. To get the recent lost music back I used some software that I had used before called something like iPod2Computer and which does exactly that. As iTunes library files and database file was pointing at the M drive if I was to use the K drive as a K drive then I would have had to remove everything from iTunes and reimported the backup versions into iTunes. Importing 39,000 tracks/podcasts is not for the feint hearted. It would have taken a week and somewhere during that week it would fail somewhere.

Think, think, think. Got it. What I needed to do was swap the drives over so that the K drive was the M drive and the old M drive can take a hike. Easier said than done. I removed the M drive and plugged the K drive into the M drive USB socket and it was still displayed as the K drive. I plugged the old busted M drive into the K drives USB socket and that was still displayed as the M drive. Ok leave old M drive connected to the K drives USB socket and disconnect the old K drive that I had just connected to the old M drive and reboot the PC. That did it, the old M drive now showed up as the K drive and in Windows Explorer there was no M drive. Plugged the old K drive into the M drives USB socket and it showed up as an M drive. Removed the old M drive that was showing up as the K drive and good riddance to that.

Started up iTunes and it displayed a message about did it want me to reorganise the files. This was because the old M drive had the music files in a folder called iTunesmusic but the old K drive, and now the M drive had all of the music folders in the root. This meant that the library file and xml file were looking for a folder that didn’t exist. I said yes to the organise question and it shot through the whole lot in a few minutes, obviously updating the library file and xml file to remove the reference to the missing iTunesmusic folder. And it works.

I started reading the Ajax book I bought the other day and tried to code one of the example ajax applications.

It was just a noddy little thing that would update a couple of fields on a page. It took about 25 lines of code and there was quite a lot of concepts for me to learn. I did get the code to actually start to run. It appeared to successfully create some functions and heavee them up into memory. I have to assume that was the case as the creation of three functions was performed before the HTML to display the page and I didn’t get any error messages at that time. As soon as I hit the update control I get a ‘Error on page’ message.

I tweeked the syntax and and added and removed various brackets but am stuck. I have noticed that some called Javascript isn’t actually identified as a Javascript script file by Windows Explorer. This script file was downloaded and was in a ZIP file. When it has been unzipped then the file shows up as a ‘Jscript Script File’ in Winzip in the file Type column. When I copied that file to the same folder as my noddy Ajax application then it shows up as a ‘JS’ file in the Type column of Windows Explorer. This looks to me as if Windows isn’t recognising this file type and maybe is the reason why the application is stalling.

I bet it’s something ridiculously trivial. 

Sometimes when I have iTunes running I can here the hard drive churning away like billy-o, and this goes on for hours. What the heck is iTunes doing? If nothing else it’s wearing out the hard drive.