Dropped Album artwork

Hi

I recently scanned in my music collection, it is on an external drive and it was mounted as E: at the time of scanning ...it took days.

All tracks are fully tagged with artwork and organised into albums, looks lovely when completed.

The only reason I use iTunes over another player is because of how it displays the artwork to be honest.

Yeaterday I plugged in another drive to do some work and thoughtlessly fired up iTunes as well.

The library drive had been moved along to to mountpoint G: when I did this, due to the presence of the extra drive.

It showed the library as normal for 1 second then dropped the artwork, realizing what had happened I quickly shut down itunes, re-labelled the library drive back to E: and started it up again.

Well now plays alright, as expected, but EVERY SINGLE album is devoid of artwork in the layout.

it shows artwork in the miniplayer, it shows in the seekbar at the top ... covers are after all embedded in each track. Covers re-appears if I click show info .... but that is an unfeasible solution to get artwork back for over 16000 albums ... Album cache itself is about 15gb, as I said it took days to scan.

Do I really have to re-scan the entire collection just because it fired up once with the external drive on a different mount point (quickly rectified)?

If this is true its a deal-breaker. iTunes doesn't *play* tracks better than anything else, it merely displays them better, if it can no longer do this, well , as a dragon once said:

I'm out!