here's the deal

1) My laptop died. fortunately i had backed up all my music a couple of days before

2) i had to format my laptop to get it running again

3) with the laptop back up and running i copied over my music from my external hard drive to the new computer

4) i downloaded and opened itunes - set C: documents > itunes music as the library location

5) it found only the majority of my music. for example it hasn't got a lot of things i have got recently even though they are on the pc in the correct folders

6) there are no playlists, ratings or play counts at all

7) i tried importing some old library.xml files (i hadn't backed up the actual library file that recently to the computer dying) but it hasn't done anything

I have searched on the internet and nothing seems to answer my question. please help...