Huge mistake when moving itunes media folder

[mattymaky]

Oh I am kicking myself so much now.
I had the iTunes media folder on a partitioned external HD which was fast running out of space.
So I copied the folder back to my internal drive, reformatted the external disk to one partition then moved the iTunes folder to the external hard drive.
Reset preferences on the iTunes to the new non-partitioned external hard drive.
Yep I can hear you all groan at my stupidity.
Opened iTunes only to realize my mistake. All the songs, movies, tv shows etc all have that "!" next to it because I have obviously broken the links!
Anyway that I can save myself hours and hours of painful locating each song and show?

 

[tug]

so you haven't got an earlier backup of the file?

 

[tug]

so you haven't got an earlier backup of the file?

me again i just saw you formatted your ext. that makes me look a bit of a fool.

disregard my post.

 

[And]

Can you just drop the folder on to the itunes icon and let it find everything?

 

[mattymaky]

Thought I had it sorted. Basically I just went to one of the "!" and ask it to locate it etc and it did manage to find most of my missing links. I just did it a couple of times with a few "!" and it managed to trace all of the files.
It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be and took about 40 mins.
BUT then.....
Okay totally confused
Please stay with me.
The iTunes media folder is a folder that I exported out to the external hard drive from Home>music>iTunes>iTunes media
This was where all my shows, movies and music was stored. There were folders already labelled music, movies TV shows, books etc This was >600GB.
As explained above I managed to get everything back into it's appropriate folder.
iTunes no longer had "!" everywhere and voila thought that was it.
BUT now I have noticed that every time I play a song it will create another copy of the song in the iTunes media folder on external but not under the sun folder called music. So after playing 10 songs I have 10 files in the Itunes media folder when there is another copy in the music folder. Make sense? I like things tidy and organized so this is driving me crazy.
I just looked in my TV shows file and most of my TV series are missing! But when I look in Itunes they are there and play. After being played they show up in the external drive>iTunes media>tv shows and in the correct TV show! Huh?
Help I feel I have lost the plot!