iTunes library is missing music since I reformatted my computer

[OnionPatch]

I just reformatted my hard drive. It was messed up and I needed to start fresh. I copied my iTunes library to a removable disc along with all my other stuff before reformatting. After reformatting, I downloaded and installed iTunes again and imported my old library from the portable disc. But now there are some albums and audio files missing on my iTunes library and I can't figure out why. At first I thought maybe it was only the music I copied from CDs to the computer missing not ones I bought at the iTunes store, but no, there were a lot of albums still there that I'd copied from CDs and some missing that I'd purchased from the iTunes store so it's a mix. Also, I had about 20 different audio books purchased from Audible before all this and about 75% of them are missing now. It's not just old ones that are missing or something that makes some kind of sense. Some of the most recently purchased and downloaded are missing along with random older ones. I'm not worried about audio books so much because I can download them from the Audible website again but I'm worried about my music. I'm afraid to sync my iPod now because I'm afraid it will delete all the songs on the iPod that are now missing in my iTunes library.

Did anyone ever have anything like this happen to them? What could the problem be? How can I get my old music back in my iTunes library, either find it from my backups (shouldn't those songs still be somewhere in the library I backed up?) or copy the missing songs/albums from iPod to iTunes? Meanwhile, is there a way I can sync only the new stuff on iTunes to my iPod and not the whole library until I get all my music back on iTunes? I just got a new audiobook I'm dying to get on my iPod so I can start listening to it.

[Jersey Devil]

1. Your OS Vista?

Vista sometimes has a problem copying and pasting large numbers of files between an external disk and an internal disk. I was missing some photos when I recently formatted and then copied and pasted my backups from my external hard drive back to my internal hard drive. Luckily those files were still on the external hard drive so all I had to do was copy and paste small amounts of them at a time and got them all back on my hard drive. I'd check to see if you have more files on your external drive than your internal drive. If so, recopy them. I haven't seen the problem the other way around (when copying TO an external disk) but then again I usually don't back up all my photos at once so I don't know if Vista screws that up as well.

I've since been making my backups with a disk image on Acronis so it is no longer a problem for me.

[footinmouth]

2. Use CopyTrans

I use this software:

http://www.copytrans.net/?id=70&gclid=CKeWxMfSq50CFcZM5Qod-lEMjQ

I think I paid $20 for it and it was well worth it. You can back up your iPod to an external device and then restore back to your iTunes library.