Help! All of my Itunes comments, ratings, playlists have disappeared.

I am not an expert, but I have been trying to find an answer to my problem and have learned enough to know that it must be possible to save the work I`ve done, but I don`t know how. I have a large music library - about 15000 songs which I keep on an external hard drive. Actually I have 2 external hard drives. I was about to update to OSX, and I decided to backup my files and computer first. I copied by draggin and dropping my music library from the original external hard drive to the second, so that I would have an extra back up (I was a DJ and collector and have painstakingly transferred everything onto my computer, so I really don`t want to lose my library).
I didn`t change anything in the original library. Well, this backup took some time, so I left my computer copying files and when I came back it was all copied, but my library was empty. I opened up the original library again, and the music was all there (there were actually some additional tracks) but all of my comments and ratings and playlists are gone. I don`t have any idea why this happened.
Most important to me is to try to get back my comments and ratings. Maybe it was a dumb idea, but I have been putting a good bit in the "comments" section that I really need (like categories or moods that I can use as a search), in addition to the ratings. All of this has taken hours, well more like days, to set up. I was more than halfway done.
I tried a couple of things that were suggested in forums about using the library and xml files, but nothing has changed it at all. I opened the xml file and looked to see that it has all of the comments and so on, and is completely up to date to the time I did the back up, so I know the information is there. Again, since I was just making a backup, I never changed anything in my original library, it is all in the same place, so I think there should be some way to put my ratings and comments back into Itunes, right?
Do I need to remove the Itunes program and reload it to start it all over again? I guess I am a little afraid about what to do next. Should I update to OSX first? Is the large library size a problem? Also, if all else fails, is there some way to convert the xml file into something like a table where I could at least get my comments and ratings listed with the tracks and reenter the information track by track?
Does this make any sense? I actually haven`t had any real problems with this before now, and have been using Itunes for a few years. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Post by Zevoneer: iPod media recovery options - http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6273675

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