Can't get LR3 to import photos from one external hard drive to another?

I'm wanting to move thousands of raw photos from a folder in one external hard drive to another folder in a different external hard drive so all my photos are in one photo folder instead of two.  I've gone through the importing routine inside of lightroom to move the folder over to the new hard drive.  However, the photos don't move because they still show up on the old hard drive and not the new one.  What's weird is when I try to import it again, the grid view shows all the photos I'm wanting to import and when I move my cursor over any of the photos they are faded out and it says the photos are already imported.  However, if this is true why aren't they showing up in the new folder on my new external hard drive?  I know the new external hard drive works fine because I've successfully been putting all my newer photos there since I started using LR about one year ago.  The one's I'm trying to move over are older photos I shot try to using LR.
I'm stumped and need some help.  Thanks in advance.

You wrote
"Are you saying while I'm in LR just grab the folder I want to move and drop it into the new hard drive"
Yes, that's the way to move photos & folders from within LR.
LR will then update its catalog with the new location and everything should be fine.
Importing is not a good way for moving photos / folders. Since the photos are already in the catalog you had to uncheck <Don't import suspected duplicates> or all the photos will be greyed-out in the import dialog. If you did that LR would import the photos from drive A and put it on drive B. But they would still be on drive A, so you'd have the photos on both drives and would have to delete them on drive A.
But more important: By default LR saves all edits in the catalog, they are not saved with the images themselves. That means by doing an import instead of a drag-and-drop move you'd lose your edits.
You can save your edits to xmp, a side-car file that is stored together with the image file, and the xmps would be imported. But LR does not store everything as xmp. For instance Virtual Copies, Collections, Stacking are saved only in the catalog, so by doing an import you'd lose these things.
Unless you know LR very well, it's best to use the Import Feature only for images that are NOT yet in LR.
And another thing: Before doing major operations like moving big amounts of photos, it's best to backup your catalog first.
WW

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