iPod music?

All of my music on my iPod is gone?

• Last night my iPod was working perfectly because I downloaded music. This morning, I plugged in my iPod because I was going to download more music and it said that iTunes was unable to find my iPod or something and my only option was to restore it. So I let it restore. Everything finished and my iPod informed me that the backup was complete. Then I went to check if all of my music was there, just to make sure, and it was ALL GONE. I checked under the "music" section on my iTunes and there was nothing there. Then I went to my library and drag and dropped music from there into my iPod under music and it would say that it was syncing. I checked to see if that one song was on my iPod and it still wasn't showing up. It won't work for any song that I try to put on it. I don't get my songs from iTunes. All the music in my library were previously on my iPod before it made me restore it. And it said it backed up all of my stuff, but nothing is there. I even turned off the ipod, tried unplugging it and plugging it back in, I even restarted iTunes but nothing is working. Someone please help me before I scream and just throw away my iPod.

• Answer:

  Have you tried searching your computer for the music? Is it still on the hard-drive. The easiest way to check is if you have windows 7.flatten all your windows press F3 and then search the location c: for *.mp3 This will search for all the mp3's on your harddrive. If it doesn't find any then maybe iTunes has deleted it all - in which case restore your computer from a backup which I am sure you have :) If however it does make sure they are in your iTunes music folder. Check the preferences under tools in iTunes to see where this folder is. Then reboot your machine and try again.