i had corruption problems with my OS (how about that!?!) and had to wipe the pc and re-install it. it's a great machine lasted for years without problems till now. for some reason I was never able to "back up" my itunes purchases to a DVD because they would always fail (only burning them mind you, everything else would burn like a charm) so i backed up everything (the entire iTunes folder, songs, games, movies, podcast, apps, books, everything) onto an external hard drive all 93gb of the folder called "iTunes.

Ok, i've re-installed the OS, everythings beautiful, like brand new, now, how do I get all my stuff into the newly installed iTunes folder? should i simply copy the old itunes folder contents into the new itunes folder? there doesn't seem to be any way to "import" it or search for it. i'm concerned it won't recognize the copied folder contents. even though it's all mine and i'm logged into itunes with my account and it should know that i've purchased all of that stuff as a result of that.

i have not yet sync'd my iPhone4 or my iPad2 because i was hoping to find out what to do about my "stuff" i just don't want to mess up the itunes software that was just installed on the newly installed OS on the PC.

thank you in advance for anyone and everyone who helps me out with this. this is the first time i've ever had to do this and there isn't a lot of help at Apple.


please & thank you.

wow, i guess there no one out there that has been in my shoes that could advise me, huh? Oh well, i gave it a shot.

You can redownload from iTunes using the "purchased" tap. I don't know how to find any songs you ripped.

Have you reregistered the pc to your apple account?