I have been using Amarok 2 off an on for a while now without issue, but recently, my music collection has grown beyond the bounds of my laptop's hard drive, so I've moved it to an external drive. The problem is, if I add the external hard drive to the local collection watch list, I end up waiting a half an hour or so for a rescan on a daily basis, but if I just use the external hard drive as a removable media device (taking it off of the local collection list first), it lists the hard drive as containing no songs.

It doesn't seem to matter if I adjust the music folder location through the configure device dialogue or not, it refuses to recognize that the hard drive contains music. Since I am still becoming familiar with Amarok, it very well could be a setting I missed, but the configuration menu doesn't exactly have a lot of options, so I don't think I missed any. If anyone has a suggestion as to what I am doing wrong, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any help,
Andrew

Make sure the external hard disk is mounted before you start Amarok, then there is no problem. I have all my collection on an external hard disk (formatted as ext3) since ever and never had problems with that.
Adding the external disk to your /etc/fstab so it is mounted automatically is a good idea. Also make sure there are no permission problems with that disk.