MediaMonkey created duplicates of all songs on hard drive switch

Question

I made sure that I created an exact image of the old data hard drive (not sustem) by using the proper Seagate tool. Then before to reboot for the first time I disconnected the old drive. After rebooting I made sure the path with my music was the exact same on D:\Music. Only at that time I relaunched MediaMonkey and it created a duplicate of all songs. The old versions are in my playlists but they are unaccessible. I don't want to re-create my playlists therefore would there be a solution? I have MM Gold and tried the feature to locate lost files but it does not find anything. It wants to delete all old files and playlists.

The worst is that on all old files it seems every reference to D was replaced by some kind of square.

How can I restore my library ?

Answer 1

It turns out that MediaMonkey stores location by drive id instead of using the drive letter. This is why when I changed my hard drive, all songs from the database became missing links. The procedure to successfully switch a hard drive would then be:

1. Make sure to disable the automated hard drive synchronization on launch of MediaMonkey
2. Install the following MediaMonkey plugin : http://solair.eunet.rs/~zvezdand/UpdateLocationOfFiles.htm
3. shutdown you computer, replace hard drive and copy your data over to the new drive.
4. Once the new drive is installed and data is available on it, launch MediaMonkey and open the "Update Location of Files in Database" plugin.
5. From the plugin, you will see the old path on top and you need to select the new path for all your MediaMonkey files. The tool will then update all path in the database which will repair all songs without affecting your playlists.

Hope this will help.