Need to re-load music library -- How?

Question

I had a disk problem that resulted in losing my iTunes library folder. Fortunately, all of my files were on an external drive, and are safe. However, when I launched iTunes, it had an empty library. In Preferences->Advanced->General, my iTunes Music folder is pointed at the external drive (it didn't change for some reason), but still none of my songs showed up.
Do I just need to drop all the files about into iTunes? Or is there a better way to rebuild the library?

Answer 1

OK the problem is that they way you had it set up is your media was on the external drive but your database file for iTunes was on the internal drive. So we can get your library back but not your ratings, playlists, playcounts, etc. Those stats are all stored in the database file.
So to add them back to your library, you can simply drag and drop the external drive folder of media onto your iTunes library, however this will then proceed to copy them all to the location specified by iTunes. So even if you designated the external, it might try to recopy them creating doubles on the drive which means you would need a huge external drive.
However if you are telling iTunes to use the same folder that they are already in and the folder structure was originally set up by iTunes, it may not recopy them if they are already named and located how iTunes wants it.
So to test, open iTunes, make sure you are pointing to the external drive for your library location. Now go to File -> Add to Library...
then navigate to the external drive and that folder. Go into one artist folder and pick one album folder. Allow iTunes to add the album. It should now show up in iTunes. What you need to do now is check and see if iTunes accepted the files as they were and didn't move or copy anything or if it created duplicates.
If it created duplicates, then we need to think of something else. If instead it was happy with the location and didn't create additional files, you can now do the same thing and add the entire folder to your library (you might want to first delete the one album we added making sure you say NO to moving it to the trash so when you add the whole folder and that one gets re-added, it won't be a duplicate).
Patrick