I-Tunes won't play most of my i-Tunes library on external drive

OK, I store my music on an external hard drive and now i-Tunes will not recognize most of the my music. I've tried changing the i-Tunes music folder location several times under Edit/preferences/ advanced, but there is a huge amount of music that i-Tunes will not recognize (message - "The song" " could not be used because the original file could not be located, would you like to locate it?" ) It seems that tunes that have been added more than 6 months ago or so are not visible to i-Tunes, they show on the i-Tunes browser, and I know that the music files are there on the disc, in the folder, but for some reason i-Tunes can't locate them. Note - I do have two external hard drives for back up (I've had them fail on me before and it aint pretty when you don't have a backup of your backup) I switch them occasionally to hedge my bets. I've done a decent job of keeping both discs updated. Like I said, I've checked several times and can see the music files.
Any ideas? Thanks for any advice!

I have the same problem. So far this is what I've done but I am not 100% certain it will work. What I did was went to the file tab in iTunes and selected "Add to library". I then selected the iTunes folder in my hard drive and it is still reading it and adding to the library. When I'm done I plan to check for duplicates (if any) and reorganize the whole thing. I'll let you know how it went when it is done.

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