My wife got a new computer, hooked up her iPhone to it, and it wiped her playlist clean.
Whoops.
Can she get the songs she paid for on iTunes?
Plug it back into the original computer. The tunes are still there, aren’t they?
Nope. Hard drive’s dead.
Let them know what happened via the support web page, they’ll let her re-download them. They’ll say “Just this once” but it can be more if it’s not abused.
If the hard drive is really dead, then this won’t work.
Did iTunes perform a backup just before syncing? The backup could then restore the data.
I had a similar angina. I started iTunes and worried about the sync so I decided to backup first (Thank God!). I synced and then found the iPhone empty of contacts, calendars, everything. Shaking, I restored the backup and everything was returned.
I’m still paranoid, so I always go in, Backup, Reset Sync History, then Sync and be sure it merges. Overkill, but I’m still wary.
iTunes is supposed to ask you, upon first plugging in the iPhone, whether you really want to sync it to that computer. If yes, then it should detect that there are songs on the iPhone that aren’t in the music library and ask you whether you want to copy them to the computer. If not, it will - as you’ve discovered - synchronize to whatever is in the computer’s music library, which has nothing in this case. Since the iPhone has now been sync’d to an empty library, your options are extremely limited. If you can’t restore from backup, you’ll have to appeal to Apple as yoyodyne suggested.