Having trouble restoring iTunes library and media

I have a large audio library. I was storing the library itself in my home folder (as per default) but the media fies were on an external drive. As the drive was getting older, and I had recently had another drive fail, I started duplicating the drive holding the media to a newer one. All good so far.
Yesterday however, that older drive failed and it seems that I cannot resuscitate it. So I tried to redirect my library to the duplicate drive.
To do this I simply went into iTunes preferences and redirected the media files directory to the one on the newer drive.
The something a bit confusing happened. iTunes asked me if I would like to organize this new media folder. I figure it already was organized, but iTunes might only believe it was if I asked it to go ahead and organize it. I did. iTunes then buzzed through a lot of files over several minutes before completing this process. I have no idea if it actually moved anything or not.
I tried to play a music file. iTunes told me it didn't know where the file was - would I like to locate it? I said yes, and it was easy to locate because it was in fact organized by artist, then by album and the file name was the same as the song.
iTunes then asked me if it should use the location of this file to locate other files it could not find. I said yes. It then busied it selves for a long time again before coming back with the very discouraging message that it was about to locate 1973 of the 22350 lost files using this information.
I then selected the whole list of music files moved them a couple millimeters and dropped them again. This will make all those little exclamation points that indicate that a file has been misplaced excplicit. I played the next song. I repeated the above, said yes it shoud try to find other lost files with this information.
iTunes has been unresponsive since I did that - about 15 minutes before I started typing this post.
Have I done irreperable harm to my music library with any of the above steps?
Anybody else faced similar problems? I thought backing up was enough, but apparently not.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks in advance.
Will

Yes, that might have been a very good idea. Unfortunately, I have to deal with my current situation.
Seeing a possible simplificaion in your observations though, I used Time Machine to roll back the library to before I redirected the media file directory and then renamed the copy of the old drive with the same name as the old one.
Then I opened iTunes again, but this actually made things worse. It hung after relocating the first song (while trying to locate the other missing files based on me locating that file for it).
Does anyone have any idea of what I can do NOW to get my library and iTunes back in working order?

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