Moving two catalogues to one drive!

[lightpainter]

Hi I’m a 68 year old pensioner who is racing hard to catch up with modern technology but I feel I was born to early so please be gentle with me.
I have no problem with using Lightroom 1.4 for my photo albums, import and export, and have a good working knowledge of PS CS3.
When I first started using Lightroom I established my catalogue on a 5''GB external hard drive, this soon filled up so I obtained an additional 1TB external drive and started importing to a folder (New Lightroom) on this drive, unfortunately I didn’t notice that this drive is formatted to FAT and not NTFS.
I have now got another 1TB external HD formatted to NTFS and would like to transfer all my catalogues to this drive, I take it that it would be unwise to move them in Windows but am unsure how to proceed using Lightroom, any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[breyman]

Hi LightPainer - it sounds like you have more experience than you realize! The following should do the trick.

Two general routes - I usually recommend the first.
1. Open the Lightroom catalog you want to transfer, click the top level of your folder structure and choose File - Export as Catalog. Make sure you check Export negative files - it'll then move everything - your catalog and the files to the drive you specify. (Repeat as needed for additional catalogs.)

2. Physically cut/paste the files and catalog, if needed, over to the new drive (this is similar to what you mentioned). You'd then need to open the catalog, right click the folders and repoint to the new location.

 

[lightpainter]

Hi Brian, sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you but the catalogs have just finished transferring, it started at '9:'' yesterday and ran all day and all night and I woke up to a message saying
Export as catalog problems
Photo previews not found 54351
Photos not found 7'51

As my total photos number 6',3'' I suppose it’s not surprising it took so long but at least it worked, thank you.
Just got a bit of sorting out to do, files in red that are missing!

 

[kgilby]

Hi LightPainer - it sounds like you have more experience than you realize! The following should do the trick.

Two general routes - I usually recommend the first.
1. Open the Lightroom catalog you want to transfer, click the top level of your folder structure and choose File - Export as Catalog. Make sure you check Export negative files - it'll then move everything - your catalog and the files to the drive you specify. (Repeat as needed for additional catalogs.)

2. Physically cut/paste the files and catalog, if needed, over to the new drive (this is similar to what you mentioned). You'd then need to open the catalog, right click the folders and repoint to the new location.

Brian,
I am trying to do basically the same thing: move files onto a new hard drive. When I right click the folder in LR and select Export as Catalog, the dialogue box pops up and I point it to the new drive, but I'm not sure what to do next. Should I supply a 'file name', or will LR just create a folder on the new drive with the same name as the old drive? Also, I did try just clicking the 'save' button without supplying a file name, and nothing seems to happen. Is this a process where you won't see activity right away? Or should I see something happening as soon as I hit 'save'?
Thanks,
Ken