Problem with move of iTunes music to external hard drive

My hard drive was getting full and I bought a new external drive and moved iTunes to it carefully following directions on ilounge and Apple support.
1. I first hit consolidate library and only moved the iTunes music file (as per the iLounge directions), then went to Preferences and changed the location of the music file to the external drive.
2. Itunes did not find the paths on the external drive.
3. I then tried to follow the Apple directions and here is when this went wrong. By hitting create new folder and consolidate music again, the whole music folder copied again to the eHD resulting in 10k duplicates.
4. However, this time the songs all worked, so now I had a duplicate problem. By checking these discussions I found an easy way to get rid of the duplicates by sorting by Date (meaning move date- the second time I copied the music file the move dates in all the songs was yesterday, and this was the link where all the songs worked.
5. I thought all was well after checking the music played and even testing remote on my phone, turning off the computer, restarting and confirming iTunes launched fine. Instead of following excellent advice many of you have posted on waiting a few days to check everything works before deleting the old music folder, as my internal HD was completely full I deleted it opening up 100GB of space.
6. Of course, I did not check everything- my playlists were all gone. The iTunes Library files are now both on the EHD and on the iHD but I cannot recreate the playlists. I suspect the playlists were all linked to the original music files copied the first time with the broken paths.
7. At this point is there any advice to recovering the playlists- I have them on an ipod and iphone. Worst case I will need to manually the Playlists.
8. Learning from my mistakes, NEVER, delete the original music folder till you are sure everythng works and even then wait a few days so you will have an opportunity to properly check everything.
9. Finally, I am at a loss to understand why the iLounge instructions did not work for me- only copying the music files to the eHD, leaving the Library files on the iHD, and changing Preferences to the new music file location.
thanks

kneedragger101 wrote:
Note this is an iTunes Library that was on a PC
you might want to read these articles: one and two.
why not move your media files using _*Home Sharing*_ ?

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