Transfer of library to External Hard Drive

Sorry if this has been asked before! Still learning about iTunes/iPods. I have today transferred my iTunes library to an External Hard Drive (8500+ tracks) with a view to freeing up some much needed space on my PCs Hard Drive. This seems to have been succesful so i was going to delete the entire library from my PC but i get a warning that if i do this all tracks will also be removed from my iPod the next time i sync. Clearly I don't want this to happen! Can anyone tell me what i should be doing to ensure that I keep all tracks on my iPod but free up the 35Gb of space on my hard drive. Thanks in advance.

How did you copy over your library? I'm assuming from what you said you just copied the files from location A to location B, leaving two current versions.
Here is what you need to do. First off, delete the second copy you made. From there, go to the iTunes options and in the 'Advanced' section it has an option to change your iTunes music library location. Change that to where you want the library to be moved to (your external HDD).
Then, go to File -> Library -> Organize Library. Select the 'Consolidate Library' option. What this will do is copy all files that currently DO NOT exist in the location of your new library location to the new location (this should be your entire library). Once that is done, it should sync fine with your iPod as if nothing has changed. Confirm everything is working fine (check the information of a few randomly selected files to ensure it's pulling from your new library location).
This last step is optional, but move your old files to a new location and then sync your iPod. If it tells you about any files it cannot find, look at them in iTunes and see if they are still pointing to your old location. Figure out why and then fix as necessary. When everything points to your new location, you can delete the old version of your library.

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