RE-Importing into Lightroom 3 from external drive---simple?

This is isn't as simple as it sounds. My hard drive started to fail, but I replaced it with a new one (I still have access to all of the data on the old hard drive). I used to use Photoshop Elements to organize my photos, but moved to LR2 several years ago. I upgraded to LR3 about a year ago, and it has been backed up regularly. However, I have not done a good job of organizing my photos.
I am now learning that that LR does not actually keep the photos themselves in its database, but just a copy of the information about the photo (I know I should have known this before, but I didn't). Whenever I imported a photo into LR3, I would not have it copy the photo, but actually import it. The original file folder would be empty, so I erronesouly thought that LR3 was keeping a copy of not only the data, but the photo itself in the database. I double back up my hard drive, so I thought it would be a piece of cake to import this back into LR3. Maybe it is, but I sure can't find a simple way to do this. This is what LR has to say about it:
"Lightroom allows you to schedule regular catalog backups when you exit the software. Backups executed from Lightroom include only the catalog file. You must manually back up your edited photos, previews, sidecar files, slide shows, web galleries, and exported photos outside Lightroom"
Being a ready, fire aim kind of guy, this is the first time I have read that.
So I have installed LR3 on my new hard drive, but on my old hard drive I have LR3 folders, LR2 folders, and photo folders. I have tons of tags I created in LR3, and want to preserve the tags, but I also want to make sure I import all of the old photos as well as the LR data correctly. It appears that LR3 moved the photos into "My Pictures" which would be easy enough to bring over to my new hard drive, but I also want to import the LR3 data. I'm also not sure if the LR2 data even matters any more since I have LR3, but I can't really tell from what I have read.
Sorry for the long winded explanation, but I am trying to import the LR photos and data over from the old hard drive into the new hard drive in the most effective way possible without losing any information (like tags). Do I just drag "My Pictures" from the old hard drive to the "My Pictures" in the new hard drive and then open the latest LR3 catalog from that location? Something else?
Sorry for the basic question, but I obviously had some major gaps in my LR3 abilities.
Thanks for any help.

Hal,
Thanks very much for your help! What I first did was just drag the entire contents of "My Pictures" from the old hard drive, over to "My Pictures" on my new system (thanks to a SATA to USB plug with power brick that I am able to use to pull everything off my old laptop hard drive). However, that created two "My Pictures", with the old being a sub folder of the new. So I deleted everything, started over and imported all of the folders over individually. I also brought over the LR catologs as you described.
So I tried to open up the LR 3 Catalog, but it didn't have any data in it. There was another LR3-2 catalog, so opened that and it seemed to be the one with the data. Why there were two is a mystery to me, but within the Lightroom folder, there were other folders including LR2 catalogs and a bunch of temporary folders.
The question marks showed up on the folders as you described, but the top folder in the collection was simply the first folder of dozens of folders. There was no "My Pictures" folder within the LR collection (which I thought was odd). There was also no "Locate Missing Folder" option when I right clicked on the folders (I have Windows 7 64 bit Professional if that makes any difference). I saw the option of "synchronize folder" when I right clicked each folder. so I clicked that and it removed the question mark and seemed to work.
However, I'm not real sure of this entire setup. I have over 40 GB of photos, so it is hard to tell if the whole thing is put together correctly. I tested out some photos and the tags seem to be there, but I am going to have get more comfortable with how LR3 creates and stores data. I've started wading through the LR tutorials, but most of it I know about. It is the storage, organization and especially, the backup and reimporting of photos and information that has me squirming.
Thanks for the help!
Randy

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