Importing all existing photos around my hard drive into light room

I have used many different programs to import, edit, cataog and store my images over the years.  I have made the commitment to use Lightroom as my sole photo editing suite.  Since I have 10,000's of images all over my hard drive(s), what is the best way to find all of the images, import them, catalog them and maintain them?  I have watched several tutorials on how to bring NEW images in and what to do with them, but can not find a good resource for importing old images that may be in many different folders, catalogs, old hard drives, etc.  I also have 3 different computers that now have LR4.  I don't always work on the same computer but often need to find 1 image from another of my computers to work with.  Is there a way to sync all of these photos across all three computers without paying a huge monthly fee for cloud storage?

Consider consolidating all photos into a single folder, or minimum set of root folders, on a single drive, or minimal set of drives, before importing in Lightroom. You'll have any number of fast and capable tools to help you get organized. Once in Lightroom, you will be stuck with Lightroom's limited capabilities for re-organizing folders and renaming files... - to each their own of course, but it's giving me the willies just thinking about your situation .
Don't get me wrong: lots of people don't worry so much about folder/file organization since one can get organized inside Lightroom using metadata, once all the files are imported, but we also hear lots of people saying things like "some of my photos are missing in Lightroom and I don't know how to find them...", and "I have all these files named X-2 and X-2-2 (Lightroom sometimes appends -Digit suffixes to keep from having duplicate filenames) and I don't know what's what anymore...", etc. In my opinion, a well-organized folder structure, and well-named files complements metadata-based organization in Lightroom, very nicely. - do it before importing: you won't regret it (or at least I think you won't).
Cheers,
Rob

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