Different way of moving iTunes library - will it work?

At our house we run one iTunes install and it is on my iMac. We have two Apple TV's and two iphones that we sync to this install.
We have purchased A LOT of movies, tv shows and music over the last year since we have had the APPLE TV's as well as burned a lot of our personal DVD's to the hard disk (we still have the DVD's which we purchased so all is legal) so that our entire collection can be accesssed.
Currently our collection takes up 1.6TB and lives on a 2TB Firewire disk connected to my iMac.
We just got my wife a Mini Mac and we want to make her computer the main iTunes computer in the house.
Now I have read lots of articles about moving your iTunes library between computers but they all involve moving the files to a portable disk and then copying them to the new computers drive.
Being that we have so much space in our library and that they are already on a portable disk is there another way?
I would love to just unplug the firewire disk from my computer and plug in hers and have it moved over but I am guessing there is more to it then that, and since there is so much data there I do not want to risk it and have anything go wrong.
Any ideas on how to best move the library to my wife's computer?
Thanks in advance.

There are two main parts to the iTunes library - the database files & the actual media. Usually the database files are placed in *<User Folder>\Music\iTunes* with the media placed in *<User Folder>\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music*.
If you have the standard layout then, in principle, your library should be "portable" and you can move the top level iTunes folder to another path or connect the drive to another computer with ease. To open a library in a different location click on the iTunes icon and immediately hold down Option(Mac) or Shift(PC) until a prompt appears, navigate to the new folder location and open the *iTunes Library.itl* file therein - iTunes should resolve all the file pointers and be able to access all your media. Simply connect the drive to the other machine, install iTunes and connect to the library using this method.
If you've kept the database on the internal hard drive, but moved the content folder (iTunes Music or iTunes Media with iTunes 9.x) to the external drive then things are little more complicated however it may still be possible to make your library portable. Copy the database files (iTunes Library Extras.itl, iTunes Library Genius.itl, iTunes Library.itl, iTunes Library.xml & sentinel) plus any other subfolders (Album Artwork, iPod Games, Mobile Applications) to the parent folder of the media folder on the external drive. I.e. if your media folder on the external is called *...\Music\iTunes Music* then copy the files into the ...Music folder. Now use Option/Shift to open the library database on the external drive and test that you can still access your media. If that works, install iTunes on the other machine, connect the drive & use Option/Shift to open the libray on that machine. If any step fails simply go back and open the previous library - you're not doing anything destructive here, or asking iTunes to take charge of moving 1.6Tb of data about which could potentially go wrong.
If you've split the content between different locations, e.g. put all your movies in a separate folder outside of iTunes Music, then you should be able to use the general method as above, delete (from iTunes only - NOT the files) any content that is not inside the iTunes Music/iTunes Media folder, then reimport from it's new location on the relocated drive.
tt2

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Different way of moving iTunes library - will it work?

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