Catalog merging - 1 drive to 2, old to new computer?

Question

Another catalog issue... one I cannot find discussion of. I have been using Lightroom since the beginning on an older PC running Windows XP (currently ver 3.5). The way I began using LR was to only import those images which I wanted to work with. Basically these were all in the same parent directory (/images) and reasonably well organized. Having just set up a new Windows 7 PC with plenty of memory and speed, I would like to import all of my digital photos (100K+) to LR. I would also like to have my old catalog, containing metadata on ~2,600 images that I have worked with.
I would like to have the catalog on my boot drive; all images are on another, larger drive. So far, I have not been able to make this work. Most attempts result in the catalog being on the boot drive and unable to find the images. No parent folder shows up in the C: folder (cataloged), so I can't point the whole batch of cataloged images to the right drive. It seems the only alternative I have is doing this folder by folder.
Any suggestions greatly welcomed!

Answer 1

If I were in your situation, I would start out freash from the start.
But first: It is generally not recommended that you put the LR catalog on the boot drive - assuming that's where LR resides. To speed LR up it's best to have the catalog on a different but very fast drive.
It could even be an external hard drive provided it's an eSata drive.
To get all your images into LR I'd suggest as follows:
You have to keep your existing LR catalog or you'd loose the work that you did in the past. And you have to get all the other images into this catalog.
First I would separate the images already imported into LR and all the other images. Open LR with your existing catalog and organize the already imported images in LR. In LR move them to one new parent folder descriptively named. If you have moved or re-named these images outsie of LR, you have to point LR to the new location.
You will be able to see the parent folder with the descriptive name in your OS (Finder / Win Explorer) so you know these are the ones already in LR and in its catalog.
Then I would organize all my other images (the ones not yet not imported into LR) where I want them and in the folders as I want them. I'd do this in my OS and organize them all in one parent folder (with sub-folders). So after this you'd have two parent folders on your hard drive, one "Images already in LR" and one "Images to be imported into LR".
Then I'd open LR and would import all of these images from the parent folder "Images to be imported into LR" in one fell swoop. That way LR would build a catalog representing the "new" situation on your hard drive and you don't have to do any finding of "missing" images and or folders.
Finally you might want to re-organize the images that were already in LR previously. But do it in LR so that LR can keep track of the changes you made.
WW