Ordering iTunes to search a different place for a file?

Question

When I reformatted my computer and used an external hard drive to back up my music, I plugged it in and just told iTunes to look for the music and it found it, and it works fine. But iTunes is putting a serious tax on my computer and slows down considerably when I use it, and I think it might be because it had to access the external hard drive for all 1989 songs I have. And so when I turn the EHD off and tell iTunes to play a song it comes up with the message that it can't find the file and I need to locate. I already copied all my music onto my computer's HD and I want to tell iTunes to find all the music in my Library on my computer and not the external hard drive becuase I sorted and deleted a lot of songs and I don't want to tell it to just find all my music on my comp, have to delete all the old paths to the EHD, and then reorganize.
Is there a way to get iTunes to look for the paths for all of the songs in the iTunes music folder and not do it individually?

Answer 1

Two options: 1) is to edit the iTunes Library.xml file and import it into iTunes (deleting the current Library first). 2) A script to fix the paths
Details:
1) First, if you want to keep all your existing non-smart playlists, select each playlist in iTunes and "Export Song List" from the File menu. Check to make sure in iTunes preferences that your Library location is on the internal HD and not the external HD.
Close iTunes. Make a copy of the files "iTunes Library.xml" and "iTunes Library.itl" in My Documents\My Music\iTunes. Edit the XML file and any exported song lists using any text editor (e.g. Notepad). Hopefully you can just do a find/replace using the paths from the old EHD and the internal HD. Open iTunes, and delete your Library. It shouldn't ask you to move files to the recycle bin unless you updated the paths to some of the songs already. Then import the XML file you edited, and the exported playlist text files.
2) I can write a script that would find all the songs with paths on the EHD and edit the path to be in the new location. This assumes the directory structure and file names are all the same under the Library folder. I'm too tired and cranky to do it now . If you're a perl expert, you can look at some of my other posts (like this one and examine other scripts I've posted, and edit to do what you want.