Trouble w/ iTunes & external hard drives: iTunes doesn't like to play nice

Question

This is a story about my external hard drives and my macbook pro. Some time ago, I moved my itunes music folder with all of my songs and movies consolidated to it onto external hard drive #1, but kept my itunes organizational data on my macbook pro's internal hard drive. Life was good. I had more internal hard drive space on my macbook pro then ever because all my songs and movies were gone, and itunes worked flawlessly as long as hard drive #1 was connected.
To prepare for the future, I also dragged a copy of my itunes music folder with all my songs and movies in it onto hard drive #2 for safekeeping. Now, i had 2 copies of my itunes songs and movies, one on each hard drive. My insurance policy was in place. One day, hard drive #1 stopped mounting on my computer. It was time for old #1 leave me for the sweet peace of the afterlife. I bought a new hard drive, hard drive #3. I dragged my backup of hard drive #1's old files, including my itunes music folder with all of my songs and movies, from hard drive #2 to hard drive #3.
Now, my entire itunes data folder is sitting on hard drive #3 and yet itunes doesn't seem to want to play nice. All of my files have cute little exclamation marks next to them. When I double click on a song, iTunes pretends to be lost. It asks me to locate the mp3 and naturally I find it right in my iTunes music folder by searching for it, only this time it's sitting on hard drive #3 instead of hard drive #1. By going manually through my library this way, i could keep all playlists, play counts, ratings, and other lovely bits of data intact. However, this would take years, as my songs and movies number in the bajillions. If there isn't an easy solution I am missing, surely there must be a script or program that does this legwork for me, perhaps while I slumber.
No one on the internet seems to have this problem; everyone wants to use their ipods to restore their songs and movies. Since I own an iPod Touch, restoring the pitiful amount of files I have on it is a waste of my time, especially when all the files from my iPod are sitting right on little old hard drive #3 anyway. Citizens of the interwebs, here my plea: I require a solution to my problem of getting iTunes to recognize the folder of data it once interfaced with so seamlessly. I require a solution that does not destroy four years worth of playlists, and preferably not the "date added" data on my tracks either. All other data is fine for me to lose, but preferably not. I already know that finding the tracks manually keeps all data intact. My first inclination is that a solution to my problem may be to speed up that process. For those who seek an answer, as I do: godspeed, brave mac users. God.... godspeed.

Answer 1

This should work:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449?viewlocale=en_US
BE AWARE THOUGH:
I followed these steps and had a strange issue come up. I don't think it was at all related following the steps above. But just double check your music BEFORE you throw out any of the music from you computers hard drive.
Here's what happen.
Some of my music forgot what file type they were. I had some that decided to be plist others jpg others something else. It was totally random. And a HUGE pain to replace the music. But I worked through it.
Hope that helps.