External Storage Drive problems

I am new to iTunes so am slowly learning. I have a Seagate external HDD that I have put all my music on It is connected directly (via Firewire) to the PC that I use iTunes on but is also available as a drive on my home network. I have directed iTunes to look at this drive to retrieve the songs and to store bought songs. The family did have several MP3 players so I imported our extensive library of songs to iTunes, created play lists and I even bought some tracks! All is working fine, so, having played sucessfully, I closed down the PC and the external drive. Next time i restarted the kit, each track has an exclamation mark next to it and I get a message saying iTunes can't find the track. I have tried booting up before & after turning on the external drive but cant get the tracks to play!
Please help...getting very hacked off!
Markaw

this is a windows issue.
you can go about this two ways when your music is on a networked drive
1. you can write a .bat file that remaps the network drive each time you load up itunes (this is what i did and works very well, the only thing is you get a black dos window for a split second on your screen before itunes opens)
2. you can just open windows explorer and click on the mapped drive once and then open itunes and you will be able to play your list.
i fought this issue for along time before figuring it was windows that wasn't connecting the mapped drive.
here is the .bat file i wrote that works well for me.
open your notepad and past the content below (changing the mapped drive location to yours). save as .bat file. i saved mine as itunes.bat, you will have to start itunes with this file but you can change the .bat icon to the itunes icon and you will never know the difference.
@ECHO OFF
ECHO ...Please wait while itunes is starting ...
ECHO.
:xp pro
REM Login script for Windows XP Pro
net use M: "\\server\folder\folder"
start /max "C:\Program Files\iTunes" itunes.exe

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