iTunes corrupted my entire external HD

Yeah, so first off, I've always hated iTunes. It just rubs me the wrong way. I use jet audio when I'm on my pc, and before that I used WinAmp. That tells you how I like my audio programs.

As we all know the rest of the world thinks iTunes is a gift from God, so there's nothing else out there for Mac(Songbird is mediocre, and VLC just isn't made to be a main source of Audio IMO). I've been forced to use iTunes.

A while back I was listening to some music from my external drive and all of the sudden it quits. I quit iTunes and restart it only for it to tell me that the files aren't there. So I go and check my hard drive and all my folders have been corrupted. This is like 40GB of music(that I actually own). I hooked it up to my PC to run some diagnostics on it, and it turns out that everything in my main music folder is just toast. I delete as much as I can but there's still artifacts that can't be moved(even if I try to clear the memory address manually with C++).

Fast forward to 20 minutes ago. Same thing happens. Only this time the entire drive is fubar. Where my main folders once were there is now an empty pointer with a random character name. This is over 100gigs of music(which I had to re-rip/download), a few movies, and mostly software, documents, and art that I've written/done myself.

2 questions:
1. Why the hell did this happen?
2. What other alternatives are there to iTunes?

 

Sounds like a failing hard drive to me system. I'd try running some drive diagnostics before you do anything else.

 

I'd vote disk drive failure too. Haven't heard or seen any other reports that iTunes has crapped up an external drive. It's possible, but doesn't seem likely.

 

I actually had a really bad loss a while back and I ran chkdsk, took several reboots and quite a few runs in chkdsk repair mode and it keep going from random junk to file.000 or something like that name but it recovered 80% of my files ( most of it was music) eventually, what happened was if I remember right the master boot record failed so the data was there but no file system to put it simply, however you should see some of my songs now, I have at least 50 songs that are hybrid mixes of 2-5 songs, it is crazy, ten sec in to the song it will switch to another song and then switch back.

but most of it was recovered just fine, and it started out like your problem ( I assume that it was a fat32 formated hd since you mention running some windows diags on it ) where just some stuff was missing or croupt looking then everthing got lost.