I'm running iTunes 10.1 (54) on OS X 10.5.8 and I keep my music library on an external drive.

I understand that I should mount the external drive before opening iTunes, but I'm only human and occasionally I'll forget.

I recently synced my iPhone when my external drive was not mounted, and iTunes promptly "lost" every media file that was on my phone. None of these files will play on iTunes now, and when I select "Show in finder" iTunes will point to an apparently random file on my internal drive. All the files still exist on my external drive, and I know that I can manually re-add them to itunes, but if I do I will lose all the ratings, playcounts, etc that I like to make use of.

To further frustrate things, iTunes does not show the familiar "!" symbol with any of these files, so I cannot use the "locate" function.

I'm sure that I can eventually rebuild my media collection manually, but I don't think I'll be able to retain the ratings, playcounts, or playlists. The fact that there's no "!" symbol makes it impossible to use other scripts that automatically locate files.

Does anyone have any suggestions?