I've been tied-up for the past few days, so haven't had a chance to chime-in till now.
First, in the "All's Well that Ends Well" Department, I'm very happy to hear that you've recovered your music, Brian.
However, I still think the way you're using iTunes is unwise, and likely to cause you problems in the future. I don't have a lot of time at the moment for a detailed discussion, but I would suggest that deselecting "Copy files to iTunes Music Folder" is a big mistake!
What happens when you do this is that your music files stay wherever they started out, and what you add to your library are merely POINTERS to those files. This is all well and good when everything is working well, but when you make a drag and drop copy of your iTunes folder, you have ONLY COPIED THE POINTERS, NOT THE MUSIC.
Should disaster strike your primary drive, you are left either without the music files (unless they're backed up elsewhere), or without a simple way to reconstitute your library, as the pointers now point to an inaccessible drive (as Herman has alluded to).
So in the "Flogging a Dead Horse" Department (are you reading this, Herman?), I would like to report the results of a little experiment I did.
Starting with a brand-new, completely empty iTunes library, I added a single disc to the library--and before anyone objects that this is not a useful real world experiment, I'll remind you of the newly chartered "Minimalist School" of Audiophilia, whose members pledge to own only one disc.
In order to eliminate as many variables as possible, the files I added to the library were ripped directly from a CD so as to insure they had no previous contact with iTunes or any other program, and hence, no association with any computer, file structure, etc.
Then, I copied this newly created library (by means of drag and drop) onto another drive. When I quit iTunes, I disconnected the drive containing the original library, leaving only the back-up drive (with a completely different name) connected to the computer.
On relaunching iTunes (with the option key held down), I choose the newly created back-up of the newly created library, and discovered the back-up was indeed IDENTICAL to the original.
I really can't think of anything simpler than this, and would be very leery of the suggestion made by Onhwy61 to "rename the backup drive whatever name you gave the drive that died," which, for many reasons, is likely to lead to a whole lot of trouble.
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