I have nearly 2TB of Movies and TV Shows copied to iTunes on an external hard drive. Last night, I was unplugging a cord behind my desk and I accidentally unplugged my HD. Well, when I plugged it back in and tried to open iTunes, it said that it was corrupted.
I couldn't figure out a work around for this so I made a new iTunes Library and pointed it to my media. I still couldn't get it to recognize my movies etc. This morning I tried to manually open one of the movies with Quicktime player and it says that it is not a movie file. HELP!!! This was days and days of work to transfer my DVD collection over.
Best Answer
The first recommendation is to run Disk Utility to repair the external drive. If it is a simple corruption Disk Utility can occasionally fix it.
The next step from that would be to run a higher-end data tree repair utility, such as Disk Warrior. This software costs a bit of money but is better at repairing serious directory structure issues such as this.
You could also attempt a software-based data recovery using a program like Data Rescue. This software is just a bit pricey though, and at some point you will want to consider how valuable this data is. For instance, if it's a simple matter of re-downloading purchased movies or re-ripping DVDs it may be worth saving the money.