I Lost My Itunes Library! D:

[live4u120]

Well I was formatting my computer, trying to fix a boot problem I was having. When I fixed it and booted up my newer partition, I realized that I deleted the other partition! That partition contained all of my music and videos!

I now need help looking for songs to add to my iTunes Library. So far I have:

- Only Time and May it Be by Enya
- Happy Together by The Turtles
- One More Time by Daft Punk
And several songs by Michael Bublé.

I'm a fan of older songs. I have the entire Beatles Discography as well. Hmmm... That's pretty much it.

Any help is appreciated!

[zeg]

If you have another computer or HD to use and you have only deleted the partition without writing over it, you might be able to rescue it. Just deleting the partition doesn't delete any of its contents and if you rewrite the partition table as it was before, you should be able to recover everything. If you've overwritten with a new partition table and actually written to it, then it's going to be harder, although it may be possible to recover files.

What OS are you using? If you're interested I can try to find you some software to try.

[live4u120]

Yeah, it's probably going to be very difficult. But right now I'm just using Windows 7 64-bit. Yeah, rescuing them would be fantastic. I lost all of my Pendulum music. They were my favorite band.

[iacas]

To be honest, this sounds like you're asking for illegal or unethical things. If you're just looking to recover what you can from the hard drive, then that's fine, but please don't ask for people to help you "find replacements" or something.

If you have them from CDs, re-rip them. If you bought some from the iTunes store, email them and tell them what happened because I've heard they'll sometimes allow you to re-download all of your purchases.

Beyond that...

[zeg]

Yeah, it's probably going to be very difficult. But right now I'm just using Windows 7 64-bit. Yeah, rescuing them would be fantastic. I lost all of my Pendulum music. They were my favorite band.

Did you repartition/reformat the drive, or just delete a partition by mistake?

[live4u120]

iTunes doesn't let me do that too all of my things. I still have alot of my music I need back. (Yes, I got it from iTunes) And I repartitioned the drive. I had 3, changed it to 2.

[zeg]

Ok, well you might have a look at this place: http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm You can download a free demo that it claims will list the files/directories that it can recover, then decide whether it's worth buying. I have no experience with the software, or really anything under Windows 7. You can also Google for "partition recovery" and "windows 7 partition recovery" to find other options. The most important thing if you're going to give this a serious shot is to stop using that disk until you try to recover---every write to it reduces the odds you can recover files.

Good luck. Hopefully this will be a learning experience: dropping ~ $100 will get you an external 1TB or larger disk which you can back up your life to. Not sure what the situation is for Windows, but Mac and Linux have options available for pretty simply doing incremental backups whenever that's plugged in. (easier under Mac no doubt, but ~ identical functionality can be had under Linux with a minor outlay of effort). For static stuff like music, burning a set of DVDs with the content is not a bad idea either.

[murphmjm]

Sent you a pm

[Acropo]

If you bought some from the iTunes store, email them and tell them what happened because I've heard they'll sometimes allow you to re-download all of your purchases.

I have been able to do that before when all my iTunes disappeared between two computers (perfectly legal - both mine).

I've just had a new hard drive fitted and - guess what? -all my iTunes have disappeared! (and my backups don't seem to work after Disk 1, for some reason...) Well, I can recover most from my older computer but will still be missing some. If the store lets me download everything again it'll be a lot easier... Very much worth the e-mail to the store.