Purchased songs no longer 'authorized' following hard drive crash?

Hello-
I recently had a hard drive failure in my PowerBook and had to replace the drive. My iTunes library was backed up to an external drive, but after moving all of my songs to the new one and reinstalling software, etc, I'm now getting a message when I try to play songs that I have purchased in the past:
"This computer is not authorized to play 'xxxxx'. Would you like to authorize it?"
Obviously, the computer is the same, but I'm assuming my software reinstall process is what is preventing iTunes from seeing my computer as already being 'authorized'. What can I do to correct this? Thanks in advance-

Actually, I've contacted Apple support for the store and they recommended that I reauthorize all my machines when I was below the maximum authorizations. The system may have changed now, but I would check with Apple. I believe you can only reset once a year or something like that and IMHO it's better to reset your authorizations and have a year buffer zone than run with a computer taking two authorizations and then reset later (giving you a longer time period until you can reset again).
There are other fixes. Create a new user, go to /Users/Shared and rm a certain invisible file (not named because for some reason threads with this fix have been deleted before), reinstall iTunes again, etc.
Good Luck,
-j

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My hard drive crashed. How do I get the music I purchased from itunes back?

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Purchased songs no longer 'authorized' following hard drive crash?

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