How to stop iTunes from looking in old media folder location?

Several years ago, I moved my iTunes media onto an external drive attached to my Airport Extreme, because I was  running out of room on the internal drive.
I had all the usual problems with iTunes looking on the internal drive, but it mostly worked okay, as long as I didn't mind only being able to access my music at home.
A few months ago, I got a 2TB internal drive, and told iTunes to use the default media folder location on the internal drive again. I also check to keep iTunes media folder organized, and to copy files to the iTunes media folder when adding them to the library. I had already manually copied the folder structure over from the external drive.
I noticed that when I would start iTunes, I would see the activity light on the external drive, and it would be mounted on my Desktop. I checked, and the location for the media folder was still correct in preferences. I checked a file or two and (this seems to be gone in iTunes 12.1) it was still showing the file location on the other drive.
I tried to manually "cut the cord" by renaming the folder on the external drive, but iTunes was cleverer than that.
What do I need to do to stop iTunes from looking for files in the old location? I'd like to reclaim that space, but I'm afraid to remove anything over there, in case iTunes has been putting things over there instead of the new, correct location.
This is a MacBook Pro 8,2 i7, with 10.10.3 and iTunes 12.1.x.
Thanks,
Sean

Manually moving files yourself and telling iTunes where to store media in preferences does not do what oh so many people who come here with issues think it does. Changing iTunes' media storage preferences only tells iTunes where to store new media.  iTunes still looks for old media where it last saw it, namely on your external drive.  You have to let iTunes do the relocating of the old media files by consolidating to the internal drive.  It will cheerfully ignore any changes you do in Finder yourself.
iTunes 12 for Mac: Change where your iTunes files are stored - http://support.apple.com/kb/PH19507 - more information at: https://discussions.apple.com/message/22026652#22026652 - and steps 5-8 in https://discussions.apple.com/message/24491967#24491967

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