ITunes can't "see" music on ext. hard drive....have to manually find

I have had my music/movie library (approx. 50gb) stored on an external hard drive and have been managing the music with iTunes for my iPod.
Now, for some reason, approx. 75% of my library has an exclamation point next to the song name on iTunes indicating that the song cannot be located.
Is there an easier way that manually searching file by file to show iTunes where these songs are located on the ext. hard drive?????
This would take hours and hours.
I am somewhat desperate and am hopeful that anyone with advice can't respond.
Thank you.

I don't know if you've already found a solution to this problem but this tends to happen to me when I forget to plug in the external hard drive before I open iTunes. What happens is that iTunes automatically creates a new iTunes Music folder in the iTunes folder of your Music folder (if you follow my drift). iTunes then looks for your music there;but it's not there because it's on your external drive. It then puts an exclamation mark against any music file that it can't find there. If you go to iTunes-preferences-advanced,click change,and change the iTunes Music folder location back to the folder on your external hard drive,or,if no folder,the hard drive itself,where the physical files are kept then iTunes should update its library and find them. If,of course,you've imported files while the iTunes Music folder is back in it's default position,they will have to be reimported.Make sure 'Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library' is ticked,drag them out of the default folder to the desktop,double click,iTunes will reimport them to the external hard drive.Trash the files from the desktop when they've been copied over. Of course,there may be a simpler way of doing this but it works for me. Hope this helps.

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