help i-tunes can't find my music files on my external hard drive

Has your external drive always been drive F?

Right click->Get Info on one of the songs that won't play and see where it's trying to look for the song. If it's looking under a different drive letter have windows assign that drive letter to your external drive.

+Oh, I had that problem.+
+You have to drag ALL of the music off the hard drive to your computer folders.+
+Get to your music folders on your computer and place the songs on there THEN open them up with iTunes.+

+If you un-plug the hard drive without putting the music on your computer, the computer has no file to run off of to play the music!+
+Just drag the music somewhere you can keep it safe.+
+If you have a PC, follow these steps:+

+1) Click the "Start" button on the bottom left corner of your computer home page.+
+2) Click on "My Music" or something similar to that.+
+3) Click on "iTunes"+
+4) Click on "iTunes" music or Library.+
+5) If you see a bunch of folders full of music, then drag the songs from your hard drive into that area. Then open the songs up onto "iTunes" that way.+

+I hope it helps!+

All of my several thousand mp3s are on an external HD, and i-tunes just comes up with an exclamation mark next to each of the tunes saying it can't find the original file.

Have these always been on the external and they were previously working?

I've changed the i-tunes music location to my external HD (F drive) in preferences

If you moved the music yourself, this will simply tell iTunes to use that location for anything in the future. It will still look for everything in iTune in teh location it was at before.

and consolidated the library,

Consolidating will copy everything in iTunes to the location you set in iTunes prefs -> Advanced - iTunes music folder location.
If you moved all the music from that location then consolidated, there is nothing to move, since iTunes will be looking for music in the original location.

Does anyone have any idea how I can get i-tunes to relocate all of my music files

Let iTunes relocate them. You do not relocate them.

Do this...
Quit iTunes.
Move all the music back to the original location. Don't leave the music there as iTunes will simply duplicate it at that location when you consolidate.
Open iTunes.
Make sure iTunes prefs -> Advanced is set to the external where you want it.
Then File -> Libary -> Consolidate.

{quote:title=Nolan! 😀 wrote:}{quote}
+You have to drag ALL of the music off the hard drive to your computer folders.+

Ummm, where is it you think the "computer folders" are stored if not on the hard drive?
Patrick