External Drives and Itunes / storing music library on multiple drives

My hard disk is only 20GB and I quickly ran out of space to keep all my music, so I ended up getting a 160GB external drive. I continue to keep some music on the 20GB drive, but I keep alot of live stuff in in folders on the 160GB external. So,as of now I keeping music on two different drives - one of which is not connected all the time.
Heres the problem: Once I add the folders from the external drive to my Itunes library everything works fine UNTIL I disconnect the drive. After I have the drive disconnected and I try to go back to Itunes and reconnect the drive at some later point Itunes loses track of the songs and says "original file could not be found" Further in order to locate the songs I have to go locate each sond INDIVIDUALLY for Itunes, which , needless to say, take forever and is not practical. The only solution I have found is either A) keeping the external permanently connected (not an option) or deleting the music and adding it again each times I reconnect the external (possible, put a pain in the butt)
Basically I guess this is a problem of Itunes preserving file assosciations, but does anyone know how to fix it?
Thanks.

Many programs exhibit this characteristic.
When the program starts up it looks for all its references, in this case the library and its attached files. I don't think that this is refreshed until specifically asked to do so, possibly when an iPod is connected. When you open iTunes it looks for the files and marks any it cannot find with the apostrophe. One possibility is to minimize iTunes and then maximise it again. My library is on an external drive, I have configured it as Drive I: (Shouldn't ever clash with another drive such as a key drive) I take the drive to work with me where I have another machine also configured as drive I: So far this seems to work OK. I'll have to give it some more testing and come back to you again. TTFN

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External Drives and Itunes / storing music library on multiple drives

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