Just about filled up my internal hard drive, so time to transfer my mp3 collection to an external drive. What's the best way to do it, making sure that the file structure on the drive, all the album covers and all the equalizer settings are properly reproduced?

Copy the folder iTunes onto your new hard disk and then tell iTunes where it is in preferences.

Away you go.

apple have excellent documentation for iPod and iTunes.

Here's their article on moving the library:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305451

I've just done this
My old iTunes library was located at
C:\Documents and Settings\xxxx\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music

I went into that folder and selected all files (Edit...Select All)
then (Edit...Move To Folder)

I then moved all to

H:\iTunes\iTunes Music

I then went my iTunes
Edit....Preferences...Advanced
and changed the folder location to

H:\iTunes\iTunes Music

Hope this helps

To answer my own question, there doesn't seem to be a way to do this the way I wanted. My original folder structure had the music divided up in alphabetical sub-folders like Artist A-F, Artist G-H etc. I copied this across to the new drive, changed the preferences to the new address, and did a search and replace on the Itunes Library.xml file so that it would preserve my file structure. Didn't work.

So I tried the recommended Apple method, which preserved the artist/album folder structure, but destroyed the levels which I'd created to break that up, so that I now have all my files transferred, have preserved my album cover and equaliser information, but now have a folder with 1300 subfolders in a single level. Not very satisfactory at all, but that seems to be all that I can do.