Problems - Recovering Library After a Hard Drive Failure

I would really appreciate any tips or help.
I keep all my music on an external drive in a folder located as H:/iTunesFolder
After a hard drive crash (my C drive not the external) I lost the itunes XML but I was able to recover it.
After getting a new C drive I reinstalled iTunes and copied my saved XML and ITL into the iTunes folder.
Now when I open iTunes about 80% of my songs have the exclamation point. When I search for the song it's always right there in the correct folder
I even checked the XML using notepad and I cannot see any reason that the files will not connect.
So what can I do, is there a way to MASS reconnect all the files since they are all in the right place with the right names or is there a way to get them connected in the first place.
Thanks a lot

The easiest way would be to put all the messages that are new since the backup you want to restore from into one or more temporary mailboxes, and export those mailboxes. Put them somewhere where they won't be overwritten by restored data. Then restore. Import the mailboxes you exported and move the messages back into place.

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Problems - Recovering Library After a Hard Drive Failure

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