iTunes media on external HDD keeps erasing

[GLaDOS]

Hi everyone,

I've been wrestling with this issue for a few weeks. I keep my iTunes media on an external hard drive b/c it simply got too large. When I moved it from my local HDD to the external I used Windows Explorer and simply cut and paste the media from one HDD to the other. I realize now that has caused me these headaches as iTunes has built in ways to make this transition easy. However my iTunes media is too large now to move back to my local HDD. Now every once in a while (say 45% of the time) when I start iTunes all my media is gone so I have to reimport it from the external HDD and remake all my playlists which is a real headache.

I know there are a plethora of articles describing how to move your media but I haven't been able to find a way to make it work with iTunes after it's already been manually moved to the external HDD. Has anyone else encountered this problem and have you by any chance found a solution??

 

[GLaDOS]

I looked into it further and it seems to happen when I change the iTunes media folder location in iTunes (Edit > Preferences > Advanced). I need to change that to point iTunes to where all of my bought media should be stored on my external HDD rather than on my local drive. I believe this has something to do with the iTunes Library.itl file but I've tried playing around with it with no success.