How to restore library from backup on external hard drive

I am helping my wife move her library to a new computer after the old one crashed. I backed up my wife's music library to an external hard drive by simply copying and pasting all the files in her My Music >> iTunes folder into the external hard drive. When she got a new laptop, I tried placing those same files from the external hard drive into the My Music >> iTunes folder on the new computer (overwriting the few default files that were there), but that didn't seem to work. iTunes does not acknowledge that any songs have been added. I also noticed that almost all of the files say "(protected)", although I'm not sure if that is having an impact on the failure.
Additional information: some of the songs are iTunes purchases and some are from CDs we imported. Because restoring involves more than just iTunes purchases, I can't simply plugin her iPod to the new laptop and use the import purchases feature.
Finally, I see a great deal of information in customer support about restoring from a CD or DVD, but not from an external hard drive, although an external hard drive is mentioned as one way to backup iTunes music, so I believe there must be a valid way. Any literature on that would be helpful as well.
Thank you.

EmmanIsaac,
Do you just want a new drive that can be read by Macs and PCs? I would suggest taking a look at MacMall and shopping for, at least, a 1TB drive (they're cheap these days) and, when you get it, format it as FAT32 on a PC. Then you'll be able (with some limitations) to share the drive on both platforms.
For the limitations on using FAT32, see here.
Good luck,
Clinton

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Message was edited by: cnd212
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Message was edited by: cnd212

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How to restore library from backup on external hard drive

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