Moved my files to external hard drive, now files not found.  Help?

My Itunes folder having outgrown my memory, I moved all the files to my external hard drive, following the directions in Itunes. I was able to play the songs as long as the hard drive was connected. However, I opened Itunes mistakenly without the E: Drive connected, and it opened blank, with no files in place. I closed, hooked up the hard drive, and opened Itunes again, holding down the shift key and choosing the library on E: (the xmp file). The files now show up, but when I try to play them, I get a message indicating that the file isn't found, do I want to find it? I can, but I don't want to go through 5000 files and add each one individually. If I try adding or importing the folder again, the file is simply in itunes twice. I can always import everything again, but I don't want to lose all my ratings, last-played, etc. It took a lot of time to listen to and rate all those songs. Any help would certainly be appreciated. Thanks.

I am having the same problem. I moved my itunes library to an external drive to free up the space on my notebook and now I "get files not found do you want to search" If I search I can find the song in Windows but have to find each song individually, I have 2600 songs I burned from my CD collection, it would take way too long. I have tried copying the file to the same drive, I have reintalled itunes multiple times. I have checked Apple and my computer is "authorized". Is there any way out of this? Otherwise I will be limited to just having the music I already have on my ipod and being unable to add any more, and if that ever bocomes compromised I would be unable to restore it. None of my music is purchased from itunes, it is all burned from my CD's.

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