ITunes Can't Locate Original File - 7.7 error?

hoping someone out there can help me....
basically, I have 2 external hard drives. the first one is a 160GB hard drive, the second one is a 250GB hard drive. initially I had all of my music on the 160GB, but when it got too full I copied everything over on the 250GB drive, so I could add more music to it. everything's been working fine for 2 years on the 250GB drive until this weekend when all of the sudden, iTunes is now looking for the music on the old drive again, saying that it can't find the original file. the songs are all on the new drive, but for some reason it will only look for them on the old one. So - if I have BOTH drives on, everything works fine. If I turn the old drive off, iTunes can't locate 3/4 of my music. it's frustrating because all of the old stuff is on the new drive but iTunes won't see it. I've even tried copying some of the stuff from the old drive onto the new drive and itunes still seems to be looking for it the old drive even when I change the pathway to the new drive in the general preferences.
the only thing I can think of is:
1) buy a new larger drive and cut and paste everything onto it. not sure that that would fix it.
2) reinstall itunes, but I'm afraid of losing my settings and all of the movies,
apps, games I've bought etc.
anyone have any advice? is it a library file issue?

Yeah,
I've upgraded to 7.7 and have a large library of tracks on an external drive. I added them manually to the library - rather tedious, it took me about 3 days!
I was careful to choose the iTunes folder in the correct location and I chose to uncheck the "keep iTunes organised" box as it messes up where things are kept. I'm now starting to get ! against about 25% of the library. I really don't want to manually re-direct it to about 5,000 tracks. Is there any way this can be done en masse or is this a 7.7 bug?
This is a real pain. Can anyone help?
curly

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