Moving Pictures to new drive- XP MC/LR 1.1

Question

What if I want to move the photos that have been imported at their location?
IOW, I am on Windows XP MC, I have imported lots of photos (7000+) and have either brought them from their location in
{c:\documents and settings\.....}
...My Documents\My Pictures\2007\0607\Fishing Trip (e.g.)
into LR WITHOUT relocating them into the library.....that is, I left the photos where they were and imported them.....+or+ I imported from a memory card and moved them to a new location inside of My Pictures. I have added keywords, ratings, devlop settings etc.
Now, as I struggle to keep free space on my 250GB drive, I am thinking of relocating all my data including pictures onto a 750GB My Book USB 2.0 drive I bought at Best Buy over the weekend for ~$190. Or may be to a new SATA internal drive...
What do I tell LR? IOW, if I just go ahead and do this in windows, all the files LR is pointing at in its catalog will be gone or broken links- missing photos or whatever.
Do I move them in LR's folders hierarchy itself- I can't imagine- plus most of my 40,000+ images aren't even known to LR.
I'm sure there must be some way to do this properly.....may be exporting a catalog and colocating it with the pics or....??? Stumped.
Some of this seems to be addressed here,
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/view...3736&sliceId=2
....but it's not entirely clear to me and looks like there is much to lose in doing this....may be keywords, collection info etc.
I understand for all my Nikon NEF files the idea of writing the XMP sidecars, but do I have to reimport all the files again when I move them? Will the XMP files have the keywords, ratings etc? I'm still not sure this even answers my request in that I want to move my whole library and all my images to a new hard drive- not burn them to CD/DVD as suggested in the article.

Answer 1

I am not at my PC with lightroom on at the moment so this may be a bit vague. But here goes.
Create a directory where you want your photos to reside. ( this should be the base directory which will hold all your photos.) I am guessing in your case it would be (new drive\My Photos).
place a single photo into the directory.
import the photo into lightroom.
In the folder view you will now see this directory. You should be able to move your existing directories into this folder inside lightroom. e.g. You should hopefully be able to see the directory 2007, which you can just move.
If you can not see you base directories (2007) there is a trick which allows you to see them in the folder view but I have not got the details on me at the moment. Someone else may point you at the trick. Or just place an image in that directory and import it.
Hope this helps.
Niall