Rebuilding iTunes library

Hi everyone,

My laptop was recently stolen. Luckily most of my music files were stored on an HDD, as well as my iPod classic.

I've bought a new machine and am wondering how best to restore the library to something resembling what was on the laptop. I've got all sorts of playlists, ratings etc which I would like to preserve if possible. But I think the index/library files were on the laptop, so I guess that means lots of that info might be lost.

As I say I have most of the tracks. Perhaps one way to retain as much info as possible will be to copy the tracks from my iPod into the new iTunes library (and I'd appreciate any recommendations for software to do that). But lots of the tracks are only on the HDD. If I go this route, would there been an easy way to import only the non-iPod tracks from the HDD into iTunes, to avoid duplications?

any help much appreciated!

cheers,

Tom