ITunes does not see music files in folders in external drive after crash

I put over 3000 music files on an external drive. It was a laborious project to organize them so iTunes would recognize them and organize them.
Unhappily, my laptop crashed this morning and I had to restore the whole hard drive to a backup of 3 weeks ago. Unfortunately this was before I did all this work.
Now iTunes only "sees" 1400 of the songs, yet when I examine the files usinig Windows explorer, they are all there.
How can I get iTunes to again "see" all the music files.
they are organized in a directory called iTunes, and all the subdirectories containing the mp3's are artist's names.
Many thanks!

Check the security permissions on the drive. See Repair security permissions for iTunes for Windows.
Enable the menu bar if needed with CTRL+B.
Under Edit > Preferences > Advanced check that the media folder is set as you wish it to be, and also that the options for Keep... & Copy... are what you want. Uncheck copy if your media folder is elsewhere and you don't want to create copies when importing.
Use File > Add Folder to Library and select the folder that has you missing content. It should be added to the library.
See also Make a split library portable and Backup your iTunes for Windows library with SyncToy
tt2

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I'm going nuts trying to figure out why my iBook does not see the music files on my external HD.
I have a 250gb external hard drive (that I put together with an enclosure and HD I bought from Tiger Direct). I have the hard drive hooked up to my G3 iBook via Fire Wire. The HD comes up on the desktop, but none of the files are seen. Now, when I take the same HD and hook it up to my Windows PC, all my music is there.
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Hyphen says:
[The] drive can be formatted as fat32 and be read/written by macs. He could also partition it, one partition as hfs+, the other as fat32. This can be done from disk utility.
The NTFS format (windows) has only read support for OS X.
How did s/he copy the music on the external drive? Was the music on his/her pc? If yes the hierarchy may be different for the pc version of iTunes library, or is it that he can't find the files even from the finder?
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Just to add to hyphen's reply, FAT32 has a maximum size of 32GB. The user cannot make the partition larger than 32GB should they decide to go down that route.
Another alternative is a utility called TransMac. When installed on a PC, it will allow the PC to recognise a Mac OS formatted drive and read the files within. No need then to worry about all that FAT32 and NTFS malarky stuff. It weighs in at $64 dollars though for a 1-3 user licence:
http://www.asy.com/
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<Edited by Host>

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