Dear cjmnews, Wow--this reads complicated and as it is late (here in Vermont) I will have a go at some of your solutions in the morning. I just wanted, here, firstoff, to thank you for your detailing and to provide you with some preliminary answers:
firstly, to recap, I posed 2 separate problems: 1) It is on the Lonovo that I have ALL of the "exclamation-point" (lost) song-files (evidently occurring in the transfer from my old laptop to the Lenovo
and 2) The few songs I bought from the iTunes store are successfully downloaded onto The iMac. ---it is my attempt to move/load them onto the Lenovo, also, that Ive found those songs appear in the Library with the exclamation points--however, I have just tried again, this time, copy and pasting them into the thumbdrive window and they appear now to be loaded, by drag and drop from the open thumbdrive window into a playlist on the Lenovo. And as I look, the songs ARE in the library ! So , barring any solar flares, maybe theyre in my Lenovo Library for keeps ! Well, False alarm. when I guided to ans 'safely remove the thumbdrive, then attempt to play the exclamation points reappeared. Id thought that the copy/paste on the source end (the iMac) was the reason. Btu again . for the record, I couldnt find a way other than drag & drop to get the songs from /Thumbdrive into Lenovo LIbrary. Ohhhh. Im tired ....and impatient.
Now, to answer your few querries: OK, Ive found, I think a fundamental problem relating to your question about THE EXACT Path----/The thumbdrive (F: --in this case, which I used to what I believed, transfer the songs--is still plugged into the Lenovo, so I think that the "iTunes" format, or whatever you call it is not really, and I cant find it in the list of 'E:" drive contents. Is this beginning to make sense to you ? Please advise (some more !) Thanks again for your help. Oooops---where I wrote E: (drive, I meant the main Lenovo Drive C: