Exclamation Point for Songs on External Hard Drive

This should be pretty straight-forward, but I've been searching for the past two hours and haven't found anything to solve this issue.
I have my entire music library (35,000+ songs/320 GB) on an external hard drive. I plugged my iPod into my PC to charge it and didn't have the external hard drive connected and the message *"Some of the items in the iTunes library, including [song name], were not copied to the iPod [ipod name] because they could not be found"* and every song that was in my playlist shows the dreaded "!" exclamation point next to it.
I've disconnected the iPod, connected the external hard drive, and reconnected the iPod only to get the same results.
How do I get iTunes to remap all the exclamation point songs without:
1. Consolidating my entire library to my PCs hard drive (which doesn't have enough storage)?
2. Manually re-mapping hundreds/thousands of songs?
3. Deleting and re-adding every song in my library (takes 4-6 hours)?
Some additional details (just in case):
Windows XP
iTunes 9.1.1.12
3rd Generation 4GB Nano
There has to be a simple way to address this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for the replies and the detailed information. I appreciate the assistance but remapping the drive letter won't help. My iTunes library is still completely visible and per the XML file, the library location (not the physical music file location) is on the C: drive, which is correct. For whatever reason, when iTunes couldn't find the hundreds/thousands of songs that were on my playlist it changed the file path of just those files to file://localhost/E: from the original file path (which was F:/music/...). The external HD is still mapped to F:.
Any file that wasn't on my playlist is fine. What I need to know is how to get iTunes to find those hundreds/thousands of songs that were on my playlist and get rid of the exclamation point. This should be a pretty cut and dried case:
1. iTunes recognizes all the file paths of all the songs on the external HD
2. I plug in my iPod without the hard drive plugged in
3. All the songs on my playlist (and only the songs on my playlist) are now flagged with an exclamation point and won't open unless I physically browse for them.
4. All other songs not on my playlist still play/synch without issue.
This is a simple situation...does anybody have a simple solution? I can't be the only person out there that is encountering this.
Thanks in advance!

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