[iTunes] My hard drive crashed and my library and music are gone

[Jeff Bernstein]

I'm sure this come up before, so excuse me if this is a dumb or
repetitive question.  For the first time in over 20 years of using
computers I had a hard drive crash.  The funny thing is it happened
just as I was setting up a new 1TB NAS drive to back up my 300MB
external that had all of my music and my iTunes library on it.  So now
I have an iPod with about 75GB on it and no library or music on my
computer.  To add to the problem, I believe that I did not change the
iPod back to manual sync after my last sync, but I'm not certain.  I
am very fearful that a misstep will cause the iPod to get wiped out.
Any suggestions about how to salvage what is on my iPod and re-create
my iTunes library from the iPod would be much appreciated.  I'm
running 10.4.10 on an Intel machine with iTunes 7.3.2.  Thanks in
advance!

Jeff