TOD
This just happened to me. My hard drive started getting bad sectors and in those sectors approximately half of my ITunes music was on there (10,000 or so). Went to my backup drive and found that it fell on the floor and it was broken.
Went to the Apple store and bought a time machine to see if backing it up would somehow retrieve the lost music. Didn't help.
Went to a computer store to see if they could retrieve the data from the broken backup. Nada. Back to the apple store to see if they could retrieve the music. They couldn't. The bad sectors doubled in size.
Back to the apple store to see if they could help me retrieve my music from my IPod which had most of the music that was important to me. All the Academy Award nominated songs. Spent the last three years collecting. They wouldn't do it.
Later found out it can be done via various different programs out there. (That's why WOULDN'T do it)
I was able to retrieve almost all the songs from my IPod.
Brought the laptop in for a new hard drive, battery and repair the optical drive. That's why I was not on here for three weeks.
Now I have the task of uploading 10,000 or so tunes back to my computer.