Itunes ?

Update,
I hooked the hard drive with my music back up to do all the steps that Tobias mentioned. For some reason, i was able to play music on itunes now.
It gives the alert that Start up disc is almost full.

When i went to do a disc repair on my hard drive it stops with the message "first aid failed".
Most of the music plays on itunes without the hd attached but a few say file not found. When i hook up the hd, all the files will play. This has me thinking that most of the music is on the internal hard drive., and i have duplicated them on the hard drive.
How can i erase the internal hard drive of all this music and free up space, while using the hd for keeping music only.

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to get it all on the external drive first go to advanced preferences and make the external drive your iTunes media folder, if you click change you can browse to it.

then go to File - library - organize library and then choose consolidate. It will copy all music files not already there to that drive. Make a backup copy of the music drive and then delete them from the internal drive.

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Streetdaddy, the "first aid failed" message may be because of the circumstance Al posted on above: FAT32 formatting of the hard drive.

If that's the case, I certainly agree with Al that you have much to gain by correcting the situation. Transfer your music to a backup drive when you have finished following Herman's suggestions, above. Then partition the hard drive as I described in my own long post, using Disk Utility. Finally you recopy your music to the reformatted drive.

Use SuperDuper ( or Carbon Copy Cloner ) to do the first transfer and the second recopy. Just clone one disk to the other.

Once that's done, you may have to tell iTunes once more, via Preferences --> Advanced ( thank you Herman ) where your iTunes Media folder is.

Good luck and update us if you can.

OK, i renamed the itunes library, consolidated files. Then went to back up the main Drive, but it said unable to run because memory was full. I then took both drives downstairs to my imac and tried to make a backup using superduper.
When i tried to select the drive to be copied, it didn't show up as an option.
I could see the backup drive, but not the main music disc. They were both mounted ( you like that? see, i learned something,haha) on the desktop,tho.
Just by chance when i looked thru the to be copied to options, there was the main music drive as an option. When i clicked it, it said "music" is not a mac formatted disc. it is formatted in MS DOS .To use it i would need to erase it using disc utility and reformat in mac os extended.
So do i need to copy the main music disc to my internal drive and make the copy from there? Don't know if i have room...there are 4000 songs on there in Apple Losseless. Thanks again for the patience !

No, you don't need to copy first to the internal drive. While I don't know anything about SuperDuper, and I don't know much about Macs in general, it seems clear that it is a disk cloner program that does not want to clone from a disk that is not formatted in HFS+ (Mac OS extended), either because it is not designed to be able to do that, or perhaps because the target disk may be HFS+.

BTW, the reference to "MS DOS" format undoubtedly means in more specific terms FAT32, which Mac OS's can work with, regardless of whether or not SuperDuper is able to.

My suggestion is that instead of bothering with the cloning utility, you simply use the file management provisions that are provided in the Mac OS to copy all of the files from one drive to the other. After doing that, as Toby suggested you should reformat the original drive, probably to HFS+, and then copy the files back to it. That would result in greatly reduced susceptibility to file system corruption, compared to FAT32, with the only downside being that it would no longer be compatible with Windows machines. If Windows compatibility is a consideration, you should reformat the drive anyway, after copying the files from it, but reformat to FAT32.

Regards,
-- Al