ITunes can't find music on my new computer, songs are 'unchecked' & won't play

I had iTunes installed on my old computer, and had lots of playlists set up.  When I recently bought a new computer, I used an external hard drive to transfer all my music files to the new computer, and then I installed the latest version of iTunes on my new computer.  When I opened iTunes, all my songs and playlists were listed, but all the songs had little exclamation points in front of them, and all were "unchecked" -- and therefore none of them will play.  When I try to play a song, I get a message telling me iTunes cannot locate the file, and I have the option to locate it manually.  I obviously don't want to do this tedious task for each and every song -- there must be a better way.  Any solutions?

I suspect you missed out a step in the transfer process somewhere that was designed to avoid this situation...
The exclamation mark shows if the file is no longer where iTunes expects to find it. Possible causes are that you or some third party tool has moved, renamed or deleted the file, or that the drive it lives on has had a change of drive letter. It is also possible that iTunes has changed from expecting the files to be in the pre-iTunes 9 layout to post-iTunes 9 layout,or vice-versa, and so is looking in slightly the wrong place.
Select a track with an exclamation mark, use Ctrl-I to get info, then cancel when asked to try to locate the track. Look on the summary tab for the location that iTunes thinks the file should be. Now take a look around your hard drive(s). Hopefully you can locate the track in question. If a section of your library has simply been moved, or a drive letter has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions.
Alternatively, as long as you can find a location holding the missing files, then you should be able to use my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes .
Ctrl-click on an empty check box will check them all...
tt2

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