Through out the years I have been burning my cds and down loads to an external hard drive through WMP or copy and paste directly to ext HD. About a month ago my ext HD crashed. I have know backed up my music I have from other ext HD's to a Seagate for main ext HD. How to I sync the new hard drive to windows media player I've pressed sync with device and it say I cant. I would like to see all albums again with album covers. I would put everything in C/ drive but my music collection is very large about 1 TB. Any solutions to this problem.

Under Library options, the folders WMP monitors for media files can be adjusted. Add a path to where the music is located on the external drive and wait for everything to be ingested. The default RIP path can likewise be adjusted to point to the root music folder (or otherwise) on the external drive.

Sync syncs to portable players and such.

As your music library grows, you might be interested in external RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) enclosures (Example: Icydock ICYRAID or ICYCube) that use multiple drives to protect against a single drive failure (and recovery hassle). RAID 1 uses two or more drives to mirror data across all drives. RAID 5 uses 3 or more drives to stripe data across all drives.

You can start with two mirrored drives and add drives as needed for capacity or performance. I have my music library on a 4 drive RAID 5 array in a full tower chassis backed up to a large esata connected drive in an Icydock enclosure that sits on top of the tower. I rotate two backup drives in the enclosure. I use Acronis Trueimage software for backup. The RAID functionality is provided by an old Intel D945PVS motherboard. One caveat: if built-in motherboard RAID is used vs. a dedicated RAID add-in adapter, a motherboard failure then requires replacement with a similar motherboard supporting the RAID used on the failed board.