iMovie suddenly won't recognize project

I've been working on a project for a while in iMovie 9.0.8. I am storing it on an external drive because it has quite a few GB of data on it.

The drive is sensitive and if you bump the cable, it sometimes disconnects without ejecting.

Anyway, I've been dealing with that with this project for a few weeks with no ill effects; if it ejects I just reconnect it and it works again. This afternoon, however, the program quit unexpectedly when the drive got moved. This happened twice. After the second time, the project disappeared from the project viewer. All other projects are there. The project is also in the iMovie Projects folder with all the other projects. The source file is all still present in the Events browser; I could recreate it but it would take weeks to re-do all that work, so I REALLY want to be able to tix this.

Here are things I have done to try to fix it:

Made a copy of the file; renamed it; moved a copy to the hard drive on my computer from the external drive.

Move the library file for preferences to the desktop to force iMovie to make new prefereneces. It obviously worked but the file is still not evident.

Please help. I'm about to cry.