Can't restore a catalog. Please help!!!!!!

Question

Hi all!  If anyone could help me I would so appreciate it.
The situation is that my motherboard is fried on my old laptop; however, I luckily did a full backup to an external hard drive less than a month ago (I could deal with replicating my photoshop efforts for a two week or so period but not for the years of effort that I have put into my catalog of thousands of photos).
My old laptop used Vista and my new laptop is running Windows 7.
I restored all of my files from the external drive to my new laptop and after much searching and research, I finally found the Photoshop Elements 9 (PSE9) catalog file pse9db.
I installed PSE9 onto the new laptop and when I go to do a restore, the pse9db doesn't show up when I browse for the file.  I believe that is because it is searching for a tally (.tly) extension and the .pse9db extension doesn't fit the bill.  I never backed up my catalog through photoshop since I foolishly didn't realize that it didn't mean a backup of all my pictures (which I now know).  I didn't do the photoshop backup since I backed up my computer files fairly regularly.
So, my catalog is not in the .tly format due to backing it up during regular computer backups rather than using the Photoshop backup tool.
How can I get photoshop to allow my pse9db file to be restored so that I have my catalog back in place?????
I have spent many hours trying to figure this out and I would so appreciate any help!!!  I am beyond frustrated at this point. 
Thank you in advance for any advice you can offer me.

Answer 1

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rdnelson wrote:
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picturegal33 wrote:
After doing additional research I stumbled across another idea (it seems simple and inexpensive and if it works, I could have saved myself many wasted hours).
Assuming the hard drive in my old computer is functional, can't I just put it in a hard drive enclosure and then connect via usb to my new laptop and then copy my files from there and shouldn't my pse9db file be intact and easy to find on that hard drive (since photoshop was working fine before the laptop was fried)?
Thank you again!  Your knowledge and willingness to share information is greatly appreciated.
You should be able to put the old hard drive in an enclosure.  Just make sure you are very careful so you don't zap the hard drive.  You may want to read up on some static prevention proceedures.
Also, this is only assuming the hard drive was not also zapped.  There is a good chance the power supplie fried other components if it fried the mother board.  The thing you don't want to have happen is for a zapped hard drive to damage your new/fixed computer and specifically the new computer USB port.
How did you make your backup of the original computer?  What software did you use?  Is there any way to search the backup for additional catalog files.
I am realizing that you are all right about it being an empty catalog file.  I looked through my external hard drive's backup file by file and it seems that the pse9db file doesn't exist there.  I must have found that file on my new computer after I installed PSE 9 (not necessarily when I restored the external drive's files to the new laptop).  It must just be the file created upon installation of the software.
I looked through other backup dates sitting on my external drive and still don't see any pse catalog files (the older backups would have had PSE 6, but still couldn't find any).
My only hope is that my old hard drive isn't fried or I have wasted hundreds of hours cataloguing family holidays, family vacations, BBQs, get-togethers with friends, parties, etc. over several years.  That thought is enough to make me ill. 
With respect to backup types, I must have done different ones.  My most recent was through Norton and it looks as though it didn't back up much of anything that wasn't in my user files.
An older backup from July must have been done using the backup software from the external hard drive.  I could see file names on that backup and don't see any pse files.
I also have one from this past October; however, I am not sure what I used  for the backup, but I can't tell what files are in there since the file names don't show.  This backup seems to have strings of letters & numbers for each compressed file so I don't even know if it is there or not.
Maybe I should restore my files using that backup and see what happens.  If nothing is there, then I could go ahead and redo the December backup.
Uggghhhhh!!!  Thank you again!!!!!