ITunes wont find my music on my external drive (when it used to!)

I recently filled my PC's interntal harddrive with music to the point where it was so slow I had to to buy an external drive to keep it on. I tranferred all my music on to the hard drive and have had no problems with it until today.
Today, I started iTunes BEFORE I turned on my external drive meaning that iTunes could not find any of the music in my library.
This was OK at first, as I could just search within my My Music Folder to locate the odd tunes I wanted to export to my iPod.
However, now whenever I select a song from my library (even with the external drive powered up) I have to go and search for each individual file. I get the little exclamation mark next to the track and the following message:
"The song 'XXXXXX' could not be used because the orginal file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?"
I then have to search My Music folder to find the tune. This is OK once or twice but I dont want to have to do this for 40Gb. HAs anyone else had this problem?
Is there a faster/better way to find my music and get iTunes to locate it without me having to import all the folders again?
BTW my I've just noticed that my I haven't changed my original iTunes folder location from my internal C drive to my external E drive. Will this make any differences?
Cheers
PC Windows XP SP2 AMD Athlon 2600 Sapphire Radeon x800 pro 256
PC Windows XP SP2 AMD Athlon 2600 Sapphire Radeon x800 pro 256

Hi I did try that as, in the past, that used to work. My harddrive was already powered up so I closed iTunes and then reopened it. But, I had no joy. I noticed that my default path for the itunes folder was for my old C drive so I have changed that to my E drive now. Thanks.
However, I fear I may have made matters worse. I followed advice from elsewhere and have been tampering gulps My new situation is as follows:
I have moved the default iTunes folder to my external (G) drive. I have placed all my music into my iTunes folder on my (G) drive <External HDrive (G:)/My Music/iTunes/>. If I browse these folders I can see all my music files.
I then selected all the music in iTunes with an exclamation mark and cleared it (not to the Recycle Bin!). I was told by a friend that if I then went into iTunes/Edit/Preferences/General and then ticked "Keep iTunes folder organised" iTunes would then find all my music in the iTunes folder.
However, this has not happened
So, as it stands, I have 40gb of music in my iTunes folder and I would like to see it in iTunes but can't find a way to do this without importing every single folder via the File/Add folder to library option.
If anyone cal tell me how to get my music back into iTunes I will be most appreciative. Thanks
BTW - I am not going to do anything else to those folders until I hear from anyone else just in case I make an even bigger mess of things.

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I do the same thing as you do...
My music is on an external drive as to not use up gigabytes of storage that need not be used for media.
There are a couple basic principles to iTunes that I believe you should know.
1. iTunes is not a media storage program. It does not store your media "in iTunes". It simply is an organization tool for your media already on a hard disk.
2. As iTunes is not a storage mechanism, it has no way to "know" whether or not the media that is listed is actually there. This is where the "design" of iTunes comes into play.
I like to think of iTunes as a bread-crumb trail. The "music" in iTunes, isn't actually there. The bread crumb is the location on the external hard drive.
If that bread crumb trail disappears (in this case the external drive you use). If said external drive is not plugged in, that bread crumb trail is not able to be followed. iTunes is "lost" and unable to find the media. The only way to remedy this is to place the media on your local drive.
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