ITunes repeatedly looses file locations of some songs

I recently had to move my music files to a new external hard drive. After getting everything moved over and changing the settings, I can now listen to import most music just fine. However, each time I try to sink my iPod, the program manages to loose about 200 songs (out of many, many more than that). Even if I individually reset the file location, the next time I synch, files are missing again. Most of the time, the files are similar, but sometimes it seems like new, random files are the ones that are lost. The files remain in their original location on the external HD, it's just that iTunes seems to have forgotten what that location was. Luckily, it seems I can still listen to my music on my iPod, and nothing is ever deleted from my HD, but it is rather annoying seeing 100 new exclamation points all the time. Any suggestions?

I have a similar issue. I moved my music folder to a new internal drive on my PC. Now, though I can see my playlists and all 8,000 songs listed in iTunes, every song has the exclamation mark. I can can go one by one and redirect iTunes to find it on the new drive, but have been unable to get the settings to work in Preferences and Advanced tab for "consolidate library". I DON't want to just create anew library if that means losing all the ratings/etc I have spent time on with the original database.
Do you think the instructions you give here will work for me too?
Thanks!

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tt2

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ITunes repeatedly looses file locations of some songs

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