Lost all iTunes songs

Did a system restore, opened iTunes and all the music was gone.
Went to the iTunes directory and dumped everything back into iTunes, but it didn't come out right. Much of the music I had edited and it was not properly resored.

1. How did this happen (music lost)?
2. What other way can I recover the music?

There's 92Gigs of music, so this is no little deal.

 

What does it mean in iTunes to "consolidate library ". I know it copies the music from the iTunes folder into the player, but it says it's not reversable?

 

Where is the switch to cause iTunes to copy music that's placed into the player directly into the iTunes folder? Previously this was my default, though I see it's not happening now.

 

This must be a toughie!

 

That's a good one Arie!
Thx for thinking of me though.

 

Is all of your music on your iPod?
If yes, you may be able to use a 3rd party program such as
Yamipod (may not work on all iPod generations).

 

Just saw this.
No, unfortunately what's on my MP3 player isn't even close to what is on the computer. (40 Gigs vs 115 Gigs).
I dumped everything from the iTunes folder back into iTunes and for the most part it was there. For some reason some of the music was not. I did a lot of reloading, and had to re-edit some tunes. A lot of what was missing was music I'd previously edited - my hobby.

Thx Dennis!