When you say it swallowed your music, are the files deleted?

Yep. Deleted files.

I could not sync the phone manually, for some reason, so I hit the auto sync and instead of updating the phone with what is left of my itunes material, it erased the phone.

Did it delete the files on the computer?

Even though I'm very partial to ratings and playlists, sometimes you just have to nuke the site from orbit (that's the only way to be sure)--I back up the songs, uninstall and re-install iTunes, and then import them again and start scratchlike.

What logic does Windows 7 use to pick drive letters for USB drives? I thought my USB was tits up (still need to look up that etymology) because I couldn't see anything different in Explorer when I insterted them, but it assigned them drives I'd previously mapped to network shares. They didn't reconnect at logon, so I'm hoping that's the only reason they used those letters, but the share drive information still displayed, not the name of the USB drive. At the very least, shouldn't it fucking tell me somehow? Well, gotta force everything to connect on logon, at least.

That's what I need to do ita 1, much as I'd rather not spend the time.

Ah well.

Zen is my friend, I guess.

I found calm. com today, so at least I can have relaxing wave sounds while I slog through the tedium.

Bonny, so if you go into your users folder, until Music, and look in the itunes folder the music folder that holds the actual music files is empty? There is a good chance that for some reason iTunes just created a new library file and the music hasn't been imported into it. You may even be able to find the library file in that folder, or it may have been moved to another folder.

I tracked down _several_ library files. One from September, for instance, that I imagine has everything I need. But...again, I don't know why...itunes does not recognize it when I try to restore.

I think ita ! has the right of it. I need to nuke it from space and start over. At this point, I have nothing to lose, eh?

Hold down the Option key while launching iTunes and it should let you choose a different library.

This is what I did. Honestly, ten times or so. I think my 'updated' copy of itunes is just corrupted or something.

I just wish I'd figured that out before losing so much.

I thought my USB was tits up (still need to look up that etymology)

Huh. That's interesting, omnis. Thanks. I hadn't thought of belly up in company with tits up, but I also hadn't thought belly up was restricted to piscine imagery--that's the standard cartoon dead, right? All four legs in the air and crosses for eyes, tongue sticking out at the corner of the mouth? Cross-species supine.

Tits up, pear-shaped, fubar--all nice and expressive.

(I'm now realising that fubar and foobar sound the same, but have kinda unrelated meanings. Huh.)

Now that I'm mapping to the NAS on bootup, the USB drives don't have any disconnected drive letters to purloin so they're scooting down the alphabet. However, I think I need to transition to mount points instead. The computer is sitting on four drive letters for all of the SD card slots on top of the four drive partitions, DVD drive, non-existent floppy (like, will we never use A&B again?).