HELP!! New desktop and LR catalog import - file names, no pics

Help...please!! Desktop PC crashed. Had to order new one. Set it up today. After I loaded Lightroom, imported my LR catalog. File names are there along with the file metadata, collection names, key words, etc....but NO pictures available.

What am I doing wrong? How do I get this to work correctly? I am afraid to to locate it with the ? because I cannot see a pic in LR to make sure the files are the same as the ones on my external hard drive.

Any thoughts are welcome. I am sure some of you will say, this is too easy, but remember how tech challenged I am when answering me.

Thanks - DiverPam

Another piece of the puzzle...my external hard drive came up as J on my old PC. Now it comes up as H. Is that causing some of the problems? But I think that I should still be able to see images in my LR from my catalog I imported.

Still trying to figure this out. - Pam

Ugh,, i had something a little bit different happen. I found all my photos but lost all the edits on 15,000 pictures last year. I wish I could help..

Ok, this is a simple fix.. I assume that your folders are greyed out and have a ? Mark over it. Right click on the folder and choose the option to "find missing folder" and then you just have to go through and find the images. Another option would be to assign your hard drive the same letter as what you had on the previous laptop, i.e. move it from H back to J. In windows 7, hit the windows icon on the lower left side and type in "disk management" in the search bar and press enter. This will bring up that dialog box. Look for your hard drive i.e. letter H and right click and choose "change drive letter and path". Click change again and on the right side of the dialog box you will see drive letter H with a drop down arrow, click on it and select J. That will reassign your hard drive to J and you may not have to go through and find each and every folder to point lightroom to.

Hope this answers your question

Kirk

My first recommendation i pretty easy if you have all of your images in 1 parent folder, that way you only need to point lightroom to that folder.

Kirk - THANK YOU!!! I did not know how to do that. That fixed everything. I was really beginning to worry.

I changed the hard drive name back to J.

Thanks - DiverPam

Your welcome Pam. Which option did you end up choosing anyway? I'm glad I was able to help. I'm boning up on my lightroom skills because I'm wanting to sit for the Adobe certified expert exam.

Kirk

I went into disk mgmt and changed the drive name. Then everything showed up in LR. I had managed to get the catalog to show up with pics so when I changed the drive name everything was like it should be. You count as an expert to me.

Thanks again

Your very welcome. I'm glad to have been able to help a fellow Witpixeler!

Kirk

I had a similar problem to Pam and this same method worked, mostly. A few photos on the formerly missing folder still show as missing. Yet when I open that folder in My Computer, the photo is there with the same name as shown missing in Lightroom. lightroom HELP says I should go to Library Grid view and click on the "box ?" icon and a text box will show up to direct finding the photo.

Only no text box shows up!

You can point lightroom to these images or you could re synch the folder