Changing iTunes Default Location to external drive

Hello,
I have a problem I cannot seem to fix. I moved my entire iTunes music library over to an external hard drive (via USB). Everything seemed to be good. The 7400 songs played from the new location and my iPod updated just dandy.
But after a reboot of my computer when I try to play a song from my iTunes I get the message "the song could not be used because the original location could not be found. Would you like to locate it?"
I can navigate back to the M drive (external drive) to find the file but I cannot do this for all 7400 songs. Why is iTunes constantly looking back at my C drive when I moved all the files out of the My Music folder over to the new drive? I have copied all the folders over to the new drive. I have uninstalled the old location and reinstalled iTunes but it is still looking to the C drive for the files. I am totally frustrated.
Please help. Thanks, Brian
Dell Latitude D600   Windows 2000  

hi,
oh i see. so i guess that would be the only way out at this moment. also would like to check if i would to follow ur process when disable that default location when adding movies, will the link stay in itunes? and when i enable the default back will there be any conflict if i would like to play movies as from my external? well, just wanna make sure there will be no conflicts.
well, i would totally agree with ur suggestion that apple should really work on itunes if they would really support music as alot of music lovers would appreciate if someone were to write a script or apple itself would be able to make that happen. any ways to let apple know out feedback?

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