itunes re-organise nightmare!

[theymademedoit]

Hi,
Last night I bought an Ipod and straight away I headed over to itunes and downloaded the latest copy.
I have 80gig of existing music on my external hard drive (all in genre folders such as - hiphop, rock, folk etc) and I wanted to have them added to the itunes library but noticed that when I started to add the albums, it was copying them into ‘my music’. As I didn’t want duplicate copies of all the music I read up on the internet and found that you could un-tick the setting that asks you to copy the existing files (or something like that) and also that you could move the itunes folder to another location (I chose my external hard drive), so I proceeded to drag all 80gigs of music into itunes.

What a mistake that was…..I got up this morning to discover that itunes had taken all the music from my organised folders and placed them on my hard drive amongst all my other folders, and now I have a complete mess on my hard drive.

Is there a way to get the music back to the way it was and if so how do I do this?
If it’s not possible, what should I have done to leave my original organised files where they were but have itunes recognise them in the library?

I think I have made proper balls up of this but if you can help….please help!

Cheers,
Al

[Flavius]

I doubt there's much you can do now
And I didn't get an Ipod for that exact reason so I don't know anything about iTunes

[Andy20]

Do a system restore to a few days ago. This will change everything on you system back to how it was on that day and time.

This will mean that you will loose anything that you have added between that restore point and now, so back that up if you have anything.

Once its done, you will be back to how it was.

Not used Itunes in ages, but I think there is an "import music" section on one of the drop down menus. Thats prob the best starting point