Re-installing iTunes library

After yet another portable hard drive turned up its toes (the third, two of which were FireLite, one a Maxtor One-Touch desk-top item) my music collection resides solely on my iPod.

Could someone please tell me how to direct iTunes to the Music folder on my new external drive? When I try to open the programme, it just says the iTunes folder can not be found and closes immediately...

An Apple Store guy did this for me once before, but it involves making an alias/shortcut or somesuch that I do not understand, so idiot-proof one-step-at-a-time instructions would be appreciated...

Since my iBook has a relatively small HD, the only way to keep my 43GB of music is on an external drive, but iTunes looks for the library on my first defunct drive, so I need to fool it into using the newest one...

If anyone has suggestions regarding how to rescue three dead drives, I'd be delighted to hear them...

The Maxtor is Firewire/USB, the two FireLites both Firewire... I can hear them spinning up but the computer simply doesn't see them...

Hmm. You could try trashing the com.apple.itunes.plist file, then when it opens it should just ask you to locate the library.
From there it's simply a case of opening preferences and locating the folder on your external drive.
I don't really understand why it just closes because it can't find the folder, normally if stuff can't be found it asks you to look for it.
Re the external drives, not much hope of resurrecting them sadly. You can get software to access them (expensive) but it won't get them working. I had a WD Mybook do the same.

thanks for that... I will give it a try...

trying to back-up using Music Rescue but having trouble telling it to start a new library on the new HD...