Installing i-tunes on a new laptop and my library has disappeared ... help!

... in installing i-tunes on my new laptop and taking all the the latest upgrades has resulted in my i-pod being wiped clean. I still have the music on an external drive (although I think I can kiss goodbye to the playlists).
I have copied the music files in their i-pod set up folders in to the right directory on the c:drive but the i-tunes software doesn't pick it up and still says the library is empty. I have also been to edit / preferences / advanced and tried changing the folder to recognise the external drive (which is how I had it set up on the old laptop as I ran out of hard disk capacity) but this hasn't worked either.
Can anyone out there help me find a way of getting I-tunes to recognise these files so I can see them in the library .. and then I assume I can re-synch the i-pod and get them back without having to reload 5000 songs. Even better is there anyway of recovering my original configuration and then I won't have to redo the playlists either
Look forward to hearing from you
many thanks
Simon G
Dell Latitude D610 Windows XP

Well, unfortunately, the external hard drive only stores the music files. The playlists will have been on the old machine, easily recoverable, or on the iPod, possibly recoverable.
As it is, you may just have to rebuild your library, foregoing your playlists, ratings, etc.
To do this, go to edit\prefs\advanced, and make sure the following settings are selected:
DO NOT copy to iTunes folder when adding to library
DO NOT keep iTunes folder organized
Now, go to the external, and drag the entire music folder into iTunes.
Then, go back to edit\prefs\advanced, and change the folder back to the external.
<hr>
In the future, consider occasionally saving the two library files (.xml, .itl) from My Music\iTunes to the external.
hudgie

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