Missing links-Itunes unable to locate files after having ext HD unplugged

I have my music in different folders on my laptop, some on the internal hard drive, and most on my external hard drive (labeled drive F). I recently went out of town and didn't bring my external HD, and while I was gone I used my laptop to play songs and burn CDs from the folders I have on the internal hard drive (drive D). Now I got back home and plugged my external HD back in, and every time I try to play a song on that drive, I get the message "The song "_" could not be located because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?" I can go and locate each song individually exactly where it was before, but I have way too many songs to do this. When I hit "Get Info" for one of these missing songs, at the bottom next to "Where," the filename starts with "file://localhost/G:/MP3 Library/etc." It should be "F://MP3 Library/etc." Is there a way for me to get Itunes to locate these files without going through them individually? I don't even have a drive G on my computer. If I changed my external HD's label from F to G, would that help? I have no idea what to do and I don't want to lose all of my playlists that I have made over the years. I also do not want to consolidate my music/folders into one Itunes library folder.

likely your ext hd used to be G and when you had it unplugged for a while your computer gave it the F drive when you plugged it back in. therefore the path was broken
So yes, changing it back to the G drive SHOULD fix it.
Message was edited by: Nudethecih

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