How to use itunes with music all on external drive?

I have a PC laptop - with Itunes installed. I have a LOT of music all organized neatly on an external drive.
Itunes folders obviously live on the internal drive, but music is all on external (not enough room on internal).
I can dump the folder from the external drive onto itunes, and all the music is there - great.
But I dont ALWAYS have that drive connected - and sometimes I open itunes when its not - for my phone sync or to buy something
from the itunes store.
I have done this for years, and only in more recent years has this become a problem - when I connect the drive, it has lost all the links to the
music on it. I go into "preferences/advanced" - and tell it to look at the folder on the external drive - and it looks like its re-establishing the links - but it still does not. This only used to happen rarely - and I would have to clear itunes, then drop the folder again - but now it does it every time that I re-attach the drive after I have used itunes when it was NOT attached.
I have to clear all my musis and then drop the folder again - which takes a while - I have tens of thousands of songs.
please help!
Thanks!

Try to use instructions for consolidating library from here, see if that helps. At some point I have noticed, especially with huge library it gets hard for itunes to keep information about different locations, unless you have external drive plugged permanently.
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH1459
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1449

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