I've had some serious problems copying my library over.

So on April 7th I got a MacBook Pro, which I was really excited about since my last computer, an HP Ultrabook was pretty much falling apart. I had a 2TB External HDD by Seagate which I promptly copied over my extensive iTunes Library over with. After a couple of attempts, I finally got it copied over with minimal losses. (A couple albums, which I quickly redownloaded). When I say extensive I mean I have around 20,000 songs and over 500 playlists, painstakingly organized over the course of 8 years. So naturally all together with the files being consolidated and all it took up about 499GB, which putting onto my 500GB MacBook was not an option.

So, I decided to run my iTunes and other files from the External instead of the laptop. This was all fine until this Monday, when while I was working on the laptop with iTunes running, the HDD fell off my lap and onto the floor, and as such disconnected. I was seated in a chair like this (http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81n4M9JUlrL._SL1500_.jpg [1] ) and so the fall itself wasn't that bad. The HDD disconnected from the actual hard drive to power chord not power chord to computer, by the way. Anyways I quickly plugged it back in but I soon realized that the library file was damaged. It wouldn't open. I tried many different ways to salvage it, but sadly I couldn't get it to work.

So my next goal was to copy over the old library from the old HP laptop onto the MacBook. Soon the task became alot more difficult, as it would partly copy over, or some files would be missing, or the file path wasn't in the right place. Yesterday the HDD itself just up and quit, refusing to be found on my windows or mac. So I had to go and get another one (100$) and that leads me to now.

My Music is split into two large folders: My Itunes folder and all sub-folders, and my downloads folder. See I never checked consolidate files so alot of the file paths go to my downloads. I know I need to consolidate my library before I move it, so I move both the iTunes Folder and Downloads folder over before setting it as the main library on my HP. I think consolidate my library, then move it over which after that it should work right? WRONG. When I set the itunes media folder and library file to the one on my external, it'll LOOK fine, but then whenever I click on any of the songs, it'll give me an error saying iTunes can't find the file. I thought I did something wrong, so I removed the external and set everything back, only now when I open iTunes EVERY SONG has an exclamation mark next to it, and when I get info to find the file path, it goes to the file path on the external, with the preface file://localhost. What do I do? All I want is to move my stupid iTunes library from one computer to the other! Why does that have to be so hard!