Reconnecting Folders

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disottawa

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I replaced my internal hard drives with larger ones and am now trying to get Lr to reconnect with the folders. I reimported all of the file folders and the Lr catalogue, but am having problems with one folder.

The images were on two internal drives and one external hard drive and one of the internal drives and the external drive reconnected by right clicking the parent folder and clicking "Find Missing Folder". Worked like a charm!

However, one of the internal drives is not showing the parent folder and when I right click any of the sub-folders there is no option to show the parent. I thought, OK, I'll just reconnect the folders individually but when I do that, it moves the folder into the new drive but only brings a fraction of the images, at the most 1'% of them.

Can anyone suggest how to get the parent folder to show up?

Thanks,

David
 
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I'm not sure if I've done this right, but I've tried to attache a screen shot (Windows 7 calls this the snipping tool). This screen shot shows the folders with the problem; no parent file.
 
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Aha. The reason that "Add Parent Folder" isn't available is because the volume isn't available. Is it still called G: on your system? If not, then you need to rename it (and one of our Windows gurus will have to help with that).
 
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Hmmm....one of the other drives was called K and that connected like a dream. Of course, that showed the parent folder for some reason. The actual files are in the new drive (Q) and are only called G in the catalog as far as I can see. I can import the files again but if I do that I lose all the key wording for 9,5'' images.

Frankly, I'm at a loss here.
 
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Are you particularly attached to the letter Q? Your quickest solution would be to change the drive letter for that new drive back to the G that LR's expecting, and we can talk you through how to do that. Once LR's found the files again, you can add the parent folder, and then change the drive letter to anything you fancy.

Alternatively, you're relinking the folders one by one as you just have. And then once you've finished, add the parent folder so you only have to do 1 if it ever happens again.
 
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Changing the drive letter back to G is a simple enough procedure (see this link http://www.itechtalk.com/thread34''.html), though you would need to be certain that it won't break something else with other files outside LR maybe.

Going through the 'Find Missing Files' routine should also work (setup a test last night on my laptop, moving a folder from a portable USB drive onto hard drive and following the missing files routine, which worked fine as expected). But that was on 32bit Win7, I'm guessing from David's profile he's using 64bit. But wouldn't really expect a different result on 64bit.
The thing is, looking at the OP, David has tried that and for some reason it is not working properly. He reports that LR does relink to a folder on the new drive, but only brings in about 1'% of the images. This would indicate, to me at least, that there may be a corruption somewhere.

Going forward, I think I would try the drive letter change first, if this was not likely to cause problems elsewhere on the system. Shut down all apps, change drive letter to G, restart the PC, then open up LR and see if that has worked. It still may not, due to the missing parent folder name in the LR catalog. But then we could try the 'Find Missing Folders' routine again.

However, one step at a time.....
BTW, a similar 'snip' of the ACTUAL file/folder structure from within Windows Explorer would be useful, just to be certain that it ties up with what LR expects to see.
 
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I've just tried to rename the drive using Disk Management but G isn't available; none of the drive letters I was using before are. It seems Windows won't let you reuse drive letters for some reason.

I've attached a snip of the drive structure in Explorer. The missing folders are in "Pictures 2''8 - 2''9".
 
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There's probably a registry edit documented somewhere to allow the drive letter list to be edited to clear unused letters. Looking at your drive structure you're going to need that sooner or later anyway.

Will have a look this evening to see if there's an easy way....
 
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I've renamed the drive in "Computer" rather than disk management and it will now allow me to reconnect the folders! I have to reconnect them one by one but nonetheless, the problems seems to solved.

Thanks everyone for all of your help.

David
 
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Pleased that you are back up and running, though I guess you might still have a slight frustration as to WHY it happened and why the attempt to relink to the Q drive wasn't working properly.

If you ever find out, be sure to let the LR gurus know. :)
 
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