Vista problem - My Music folder won't work!

[ODogg]

Hey guys, I foolishly read some PC World article that told me I could re-direct the MY MUSIC folder to another place and I went ahead and did that, I pointed it to my external drive with all my music on it (instead of putting my music on my C drive in the My Music folder). Anyways, I removed the external drive once and now the MY MUSIC folder is blank. When I click on it nothing at all opens. I've re-connected the drive and same thing. When I look at the properties of the folder everything is blank.

I looked on the net and tried a few of the ways that I found to fix it, including editing the registry and nothing has worked. The main issue here is I can't get iTunes to work because that folder has to contain the iTunes folder.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this? I'm tearing my hair out over here!!

[Blzer]

Re: Vista problem - My Music folder won't work!

I'm lost with what you did. So you wanted your MY MUSIC folder elsewhere, say your external drive, and once it all went over, it was on your external HDD but out of your folder, and then when you removed your external HDD it was all gone?

I guess I'm lost with what you did. Your best bet is to recover a past date on your computer using System Restore, or however it is that works. That's a real bummer, man. I just lost my drive a couple of months ago.

[ODogg]

Re: Vista problem - My Music folder won't work!

OK, here is what I did, i just pointed the MUSIC folder to another folder that was on my external drive. And evidently that is all cool beans until Vista at some point can't see the folder, then you get the problem I have now. I guess i disconnected my external drive last week to connect it to my laptop and I messed up the MUSIC folder then. So now the MUSIC folder is just not pointing to anything at all and when you click on properties everything in the properties is blank.

I did figure out how to get iTunes to work - simply load up another profile and the MUSIC folder for that profile is there just fine and dandy. It's just that this is bugging me that I can't fix it.

[mgoblue]

Re: Vista problem - My Music folder won't work!

OK, here is what I did, i just pointed the MUSIC folder to another folder that was on my external drive. And evidently that is all cool beans until Vista at some point can't see the folder, then you get the problem I have now. I guess i disconnected my external drive last week to connect it to my laptop and I messed up the MUSIC folder then. So now the MUSIC folder is just not pointing to anything at all and when you click on properties everything in the properties is blank.

I did figure out how to get iTunes to work - simply load up another profile and the MUSIC folder for that profile is there just fine and dandy. It's just that this is bugging me that I can't fix it.

Can't you just change your music folder to something existing?

Also, make sure your external's getting the same drive letter when you plug it back in...maybe it's getting another letter assigned to it, so things won't work like they used to?

[ODogg]

Re: Vista problem - My Music folder won't work!

Well when I bring up the properties of that folder from the Start menu I can type in a path but no matter what I type in there is no option to apply and when I just click OK and then look at it again it hasn't saved what i've typed in.

It's a really bizarre situation. I hope that in Windows 7 you can assign that MUSIC folder to wherever your music is. And i'm pretty sure I read you can. I would like to be able to click MUSIC and have it open where my music is. I don't want to have to copy all of my music from my external drive to my C: drive, that is ridiculous for Microsoft to expect us to do that. Some of us, like myself have a small C: drive and a large external drive for our media.

[ODogg]

Re: Vista problem - My Music folder won't work!

I will check that about the external drive letter but i'm pretty sure last night I looked at it and it was still H: like it should be.

[Burns11]

Re: Vista problem - My Music folder won't work!

Use regedit to undo the change (the location should be held in hkey_current_user/software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/exploerer/user shell folders)

One key should say music, right click that key and click modify and enter the music folder you want to use (default should be %userprofile%/music). Exit and it should save, then restart to see the changes.

As to whether windows can handle the music folder being a removable drive? No idea. Why not end around that problem and just set the removable drive's folder as a link instead of using the music folder?

Did you try to restart with the removable drive attached? Removing it might break the link, but restarting with the drive attached might refresh that link (though it'd be a pain to have to restart every time you removed that drive).

[ODogg]

Re: Vista problem - My Music folder won't work!

Yeah I tried the registry entries (there are two) and then restarted my machine and same stuff. I do have the external drive hooked up.