Is it possible to use smart previews without my external hard drive?

I get it. I know I need to tell Lightroom that it's "this" specific catalog that I want to be working on while being away from my external hard drive.
But, just so I understand the logic: I have to opne Lightroom with the external hard drive connected and then, ejected it so I could smart previews that I've previsoulsy build. There's no way for me just to turn on my computer, away from my external hard drive, and work on smart previews?
So, I guess that this my real questions: If I make a copy of the catalog from my external hard drive onto my desktop, and I tell my computer to work with this catalog while away from external hard drive, will this clash everything up?
Let me know if I've missed a previous thread about this.
Thanks !
Patrice

It may help if you can understand how smart previews actually work, under the hood.
When you build a smart preview, what you are actually creating is a smaller version of the original master, which gets stored as a lossy-compressed DNG in the same folder as the catalog file. So, when editing, Lr looks for the original, and if online, uses it, and if offline, uses the smart preview instead (if it's there), as the source for image data.
It's really that simple. So if the original photo is not in the location expected by the catalog and the smart preview which corresponds to it is not in the expected location in the catalog folder, then you won't be able to edit the photo.
So to answer your question more specifically, you can edit a copy of the catalog which had smart previews (you must copy the whole catalog folder to get the smart previews, or do an export instead of a copy, regular previews are optional), then copy the catalog back when done (no need to re-copy smart previews, since they don't change, and no need to re-copy regular previews, since they can be re-created) - no harm, no foul... Or, if you exported the working copy of your catalog, you can import it after work done instead.
PS - there have been lots of threads about this.
Rob

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