ITUNES and Exclamation point problems

Question

It is incredibly frustrating trying to support a program that has so many quirks in it. Itunes should be a lot easier to handle when it comes to file management than it currently is. I recently changed out my 250 gb main HD for a 1 TB hard drive in order to have the itunes music folder on the same HD as the Operating system. Apparently itunes has a completely different way of cataloging the music in the actual itunes folder, which is now called itunes media, than it used to. When I transfered all my files from the original 250 gb volume to the 1 TB volume via mac transfer, I thought that the current itunes on the original HD would also transfer, nope. Itunes couldn't access my itunes music folder which had not been moved to the new location yet beacuse the version remained consistent with the OS installer and not what was originally on my old HD. Hence newer itunes music folder (which it was still called) with old itunes, not good! I upgraded to the newest itunes via software update in order for it to even recognize my "newer" itunes folder and that's when things really went sour. I copied over the itunes folder over to the new HD and changed the preferences in itunes to select that as my new media folder. Itunes recognized nothing. all songs had a impossible exclamation point. I moved the itunes music folder out of the itunes folder on the main HD and had itunes create a new folder as its media folder. I imported a song in itunes with the copy all files to the itunes folder to see where the songs were going to be stored. It created a music folder within the Itunes media. Great I thought I just will dump the contents of the old itunes music folder into the new music folder. Most songs (I have 50,090 of them) have come back. Unfortunate news, I HAVE TONS THAT STILL HAVE THAT EXCLAMATION POINT NEXT TO IT. and why? because if an artist is featured and has another name by it such as Leona Lewis featuring One republic, itunes does not know to look via Leona Lewis with Album Echo, it just simply can't find it. I can understand where the coding for that may be a little difficult, but here is the real issue. That is just one song, but I have volumes of artists with other artists, and when I find one of the songs in a batch with the same issue, Itunes only recognizes that one song and expects me to search and rescue all the songs that are in that same Unfindable folder individually. I can't change the tags on the exclamation songs to help redirect it better and I am forced to re-import all those songs. I HATE THIS!If an album is called boneyard and I find one song in that folder, it should know that the rest of the songs from the album boneyard are in that folder, similarily to FINAL CUT PRO which I deal with on a regular basis. The two programs with the find my media helper are written by two people on opposites sides of the earth. FCP can determine that if an "issue" file is found and is grouped with another "issue" file it scans the folder to see if other files that you are missing are indeed in there, why can't itunes. And another thing, why is there no way of sorting the songs via that stupid exclamation point, so I can at least see what I am dealing with. I have to continually scroll up and down the music contents folder and do double takes to see if a song had that exclamation point on it.
Any help to ease this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

+"I copied over the itunes folder over to the new HD"+
That was the mistake right there.
Once an item is in your iTunes library, iTunes will lose it if you move or rename the item or any of its containing folders.