ITunes' C drive access 'times out' / Recreating iTunes on a new drive

Question

I'm not sure exactly what to search for, so if this situation has been discussed before, I'd be grateful if someone can point me in the right direction. But I'm thinking my situation may be a unique one.
My circumstances are that I'm running a six- (or seven-, or eight-) year old Wintel box, Windows XP Home Ed., Service Pack 3. I installed iTunes several years ago on my C drive, back when a 75 Gig drive seemed enormous and unfillable. Time passes, I buy an iPod for myself, then one for my son, then iPhones for the family, and just recently an iPad. Nowadays my C drive is always at the limit of being too full (right at the 10% free-space line) and podcasts, vodcasts, digital movies and DL'd music are always pushing it back up and over that line. I've been bandaiding the problem by DLing digimovies and then immediately moving them over to a larger internal G drive purchased a few years ago, but I can't seem to stay ahead of iTunes continuing to use up space.
Complicating the problem is my long-standing preference to keep the vast majority of my mp3 music library in a separate file on the G drive, and just reference songs and CDs into iTunes as I acquire them. I prefer to leave them in their original "non-iTunes-flavored" mp3 format, and it also helps with the space issue on the C drive. This file is about 16 Gigs, and represents about 80% of my music collection, the rest being in the iTunes directory on the C drive. (I realize that under pretty much all the circumstances I can envision, I have a ton of work ahead of me "re-importing" the contents this file into any iTunes transfer or clean install I create. sigh)
My current situation is that I'm now having issues with iTunes. iPhone and iPad backups, being run through a USB 2 card which is High Speed but not Enhanced High Speed, routinely take an hour or more if I do them about once a week. Two days ago, in yet another effort to free up some space, I DLed a new digimovie and then moved the file to the G drive, something I've done several times before without incident (I just need to tell iTunes where the new location is). I also moved the contents of the "TV Shows" folder from within iTunes over to the G drive, while leaving the now-empty "TV Shows" folder in iTunes back on the C drive. Immediately after I did this, iTunes began to have problems. The backup portion of both my iPhone and my iPad syncs seemed to go ok (if I waited long enough), but when the time came for it to sync purchases made both from the external devices and also via iTunes on the main system, I keep getting a message saying something about the C drive can't be accessed, that the attempt 'timed out'. The C drive appears not to have any issues when being accessed by anything other than iTunes, although it hasn't been defragged in about eight weeks. But it's having no other access issues that I can see. The drive is actually marginally faster, now that the files have been moved and more free space has been made available.
So my questions are these: A) does anyone have any suggestions on how to solve the problem of iTunes no longer supposedly being able to access the drive it's installed on? And B) if I can't solve A), will it be simpler and/or easier to try and transfer this possibly-wonky iTunes installation to the G drive, or would it make more sense to install a fresh copy of iTunes onto the G drive, and just move the existing iTunes content folders over to the G drive from the C drive?
Thanks for reading this far. I appreciate any and all suggestions (other than to buy a new Mac; I'm already working on that!)

Answer 1

It's not a unique situation - happens all the time, smaller hard drives getting filled up.
It's also easy to fix. I just moved my itunes content to a bigger hard drive.
First I made a backup of the itunes database file - iTunes Library.itl. Just in case anything went wrong.
Nothing did go wrong, but I'd have it in case anything DID go wrong. That file holds ratings, playcounts, Date Added, and other metadata.
Second, in itunes change the preferences > advanced tab to tell itunes to put everything on G:
Set the itunes folder location to something like G:Media or G:iTunes
This will affect all FUTURE additions to itunes and not do anything to the existing locations.
Make sure the checkbox for "Keep itunes organized" is NOT checked. I also left the "Copy files when adding" unchecked.
Third, to move all the files to G: without itunes losing the paths, run the File > Library > Organize > Consolidate command. This will need to run a while, so be patient as it copies all the files to the new G: location. This does NOT delete the originals. You will have to do that.
Fourth, make sure everything in itunes is OK and you can play stuff in your library. If you're really cautious you can run a script to check for missing/dead tracks.