Moving songs from external hard drive to Itunes library

I have a bunch of songs on an external hard drive, but my itunes library is on my pc.....I tried to add some of these songs to my library (i played the songs and they were automatically added to the library)....but when i inplugged the external hard drive from my pc and tried to play the songs from the library, it would not let me play them.....an error message came up that stated that the library could not find the device from which the songs came from....why is this?....is there another way to add these songs from the hard drive????

why is this?
The Windows version of iTunes doesn't copy content to the iTunes Music folder when importing from another hard disk by default. Connect the drive and choose Consolidate Library from th Library section of the File menu.
(36713)

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