Moving itune library to mapped drive.

first of all my laptop is getting full with my music, so i bought an external 250g usb hard drive that is connectted to my networked home pc. i have the drive mapped in my laptop and am now in the process of trying to move my library to this mapped drive. how do i do this, and is it possiable to from now on store my files on the mapped drive and run i tunes from the c drive with no problems. also i read some forums putting down usb 2.0 external hd's saying they r not reliable, which kinds of scares me because i want to store my pics on there 2. is there any truth to those drives being unreliable because of the usb i/o input and output

I am afraid I found your last post difficult to follow.
If I understand you correctly your music is NOT all in your iTunes Music folder.
Do you want to keep your current folder structure?
If you do, life is difficult. The problem is that the iTunes library stores the full path to music files and if this changes, it can no longer find the files. It can cope with the iTunes Music folder being moved, but not other music folders.
The simplest thing is to just copy everything onto the external drive and start a new library, then add the folders to the new library. This loses all meta data and playlists.
Another alternative is to edit the iTunes Music Library.xml file to correct the paths with a text editor using search and replace. Then rebuild the library from the xml file. If this works, you keep playlists but still lose metadata.
It would be better to move everything into the iTunes folder on the external drive and let iTunes organise it. The way to do this is to follow my instruction for moving the iTunes folder. Then go to Edit>Preferences>Advanced>General and make sure "Keep iTunes Music folder Organised" is checked. Then consolidate your library, which is an option on the advanced menu.
This will copy all the music on your c: drive that was in you library but not in your iTunes Music folder into your iTunes Music folder on the extrenal drive. This way you keep all your meta data but lose control of how your files are organised. iTunes uses a basic Artist/Album arrangment.
Finally something to consider, if you are using a network drive, you might be better off keeping your library files on your internal drive and just moving the music files to the network drive from a performance point of view.
If you want to do that, the procedure is very simple but you have to sacrifice your folder structure and allow iTunes to organise your music. This Apple article tells you how:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301748
If you want others to have access to your music it needs to be in a shared folder which all users can access.

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