iTunes to external harddrive

i have ibook 40 GB, starter disc is full, and an old lacie ext. hd and a recently bought passport external hd. all my tunes on lacie on folder-itunes music1- i dragged itunes music1 from lacie to passport and now have all tunes in itunes music1 folder there, but itunes will not activate these tunes using passport. no problem with the lacie. i then dragged music folder from my mac to external drive passport and also changed location of music folder to external with itunes preferences, then consolidated library. and nearly had it, done deal. then disconnected externals and deleted music folder in mac. and now missing big blocks of accessible tunes in itunes using my new passport hd. still all tunes there in itunes music1 on both lacie and passport but still cannot access tunes thru itunes from passport. there must be an easier way to transfer tunes from old external harddrive to new and still have itunes recognize them. help please dean

Here is what Apple has to say: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301748

itunes external harddrive to external harddrive

bad 3-way plug and i lost heaps of music from my old lacie external harddrive and in the transfer to new passport harddrive when disconnected. tried 3 different ways to transfer and activate itunes in new harddrive. messing up big time--duplicates and triplicates, day(s) to eliminate. then dragged music folders saved in copy in new harddrive back to lacy. what i need? in old lacie to get all these folders into one itunes music folder and a way to activate in itunes. then to transfer these to new passport external and activated without duplicating again. the three ways tried from posts:
---all three ways suggested changing music folder location in itunes preferences to external. then......
---one suggested i uncheck -copy files to itunes music folder when adding to library, then go to itunes file to add to library pointing to where all music resides on external.
---another suggested after changing music folder to external just to consolidate library.
---one suggested simply dragging itunes music folder to harddrive.
please help me. i know naught about computer files. how then to first get all my itunes music in one foldr in lacie activated then into the new harddrive. p.s. i am using ibook 40GB, folder empty, everything in harddrives

Skybolt suggested using the instructions on the Apple website in this post: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=593036#post593036

Have you been through these instructions?
They seem to involve connecting all you external disks to your pc/mac.
Changing the location of the itunes library - in the itunes preferences panel - to point at the new drive.
itunes then moves all the files to the new library location.

If you've already tried Apples instructions can you tell me at what point in these instructions does it fail?

*Merged same topic threads*