ITunes Can't Find Some of My Songs & Videos

My old G4 was filling up with song files, so I moved my iTunes Music over to an External WD Firewire Drive and all was well. Yesterday I migrated over to an Intel iMac, connected the drive and fired up iTunes and music filled my room. Then I clicked a few titles and noticed an exclamation point next to some of them and error box pops up indicating that iTunes could not find the files and would I like to look for them.
These songs are indeed on my external drive and can be played in a preview and even dragged into the iTunes application and are now playable. Problem is I'm finding hundreds of these now and I don't know until I try to manually play them. My destination in preferences points to the external drive, I've authorized my computer (some are purchased, some not) and I have an up to date iTunes.
I'm kind of stumped as to what is going on. Any solutions you can pass my way would be appreciated.
Steve

so my itunes for some reason cannot locate any of my 2000 songs that ive had for the past 4 years. They all come up with little exclamation points!! recently, i went to an apple store and had one of the mac genuises answer some questions, one which was why i had duplicate songs in my itunes library? all was well, and he said it probably had to do with the fact that i had redownloaded them on a my new harddrive. He then proceeded to go through my harddrive and said i should delete all the music files because its taking up harddrive space, and all i needed was the music thats on in itunes - basicaoly he said i had extra copies that i did not need, so at the mac store i deleted them all. so heres where my problem starts, i empty the trash at home - try to play music - then all my music files pop up with exclamation points, nothing will play, and i cant find any of the orginal files which were on the hard drive!! i have no music now, bc some mac genius told me to delete the extra files!!!!!!! so my question is WHAT SHOULD I do now?????
sorry - but eversince mac has monopolized the industry - i have nothing but problems with inconsistent information....... i am advocate of macs - but im getting frustrated when i drive an hour to a mac store with a purchased 100 dollar pro care card - and get the wrong info....which screws me!!!

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My iTunes library was on an external drive, and it was working just fine. Then there were some problems with the external drive, so I bought a new external drive and loaded the entire iTunes library onto it. (I followed Apple's instructions for doing this.)
I set preferences to use the iTunes folder on the new external drive. When I launched iTunes, all the music appears, as do all of the playlists that I created. It looked like everything was OK with the new hard drive - until I looked more closely and saw exclamation points next to some of the songs in my music library.
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If I click on one of the "lost" songs to try to play it, iTunes presents a dialog box that lets me navigate my way to that song to show iTunes where it is, and then iTunes can play it. Theoretically this is a solution, but I don't want to do that for about 300 songs - it would take hours.
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