Help With iTunes Recovery From Old Hard Drive

Hi, recently I had A PC issue where I needed to replace my hard drive. I was originally running XP on a 500 GB drive, I didn't want to loose all my flies on that drive so I reinstalled XP on A 80 GB drive. I now running XP off the 80 GB drive (C:) have access to the files on the 500 GB drive (D:). I am worried about reimporting my music because I have more than 200 GB of music so it wont fit on the drive C: & also I have manually tagged all my music in iTunes and from my experience in the past re-importing may loose/revert my personal tagging. I will note I like to have iTunes manage my library. I was thinking if I move the iTunes library file from D: to C: it will put ! next to all 20,000 songs asking me to manually relocate all of them, but what if after that I change the iTunes location in the preferences to match the D: location would that resolve the ! file location? Any way I'm stuck any input would be appreciated. Thank You.

As long as you don't have an existing library that is synced with a device or holds oodles of carefully crafted playlists, ratings etc. then...
Hold down shift as you start iTunes. You should get an option to choose or create a library. Click create, browse to root of the external drive and click save so that your library is say X:\iTunes where X: is the letter of your external drive. All new content downloaded to the library will stay on the external drive.
See this user tip for a backup strategy.
tt2

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