Hard Drive failure......

[Kirk Gittings]

Still pretty new to LR and I'm still not sure I understand how LightRoom thinks.......so my system hard drive crashed and I replaced it and i now need to reinstall LR3. Will that impact on my catalogues at all which are not on the system drive? Will it automatically recognize them? do I need to do anything like reimport the catalogue?

[Schewe]

As long as your catalog was on a separate drive, no, you don't lose anything other than your preferences...once the system is restored and Lightroom reinstalled, just double click on your catalog file. If there is any issue, launch Lightroom holding down Option/Alt (depending on your system) and navigate to your catalog file and open.

[eliedinur]

With a new install LR will look for a catalog in its default location C:/My Pictures/Lightroom and not finding one will create one there. You can either go to File>Open Catalog and navigate to the old catalog or hold down the Cntrl key as you launch LR and you will be presented with a dialog asking with which catalog you want LR to open. In Preferences you can set a catalog with which LR will always open.

[Kirk Gittings]

Thanks all.

[feppe]

If you used color labels they are NOT saved in the catalog, but in preferences. So if you had your color labels renamed to other than default, you'll have to rename them back to the ones you prefer, otherwise they won't work properly with the files in your catalog. Major PITA if you don't remember the names and rely on color labels in your workflow

Not sure if this is different or fixed in LR3 (I assume it's "a feature not a bug").

[NikoJorj]

If you used color labels they are NOT saved in the catalog, but in preferences.

This http://thephotogeek.com/lightroom/config-backup/ can backup it, but once after the failure it's too late.

BTW you still can retrieve the labels from the XMP files, but it's not very user-friendly...

[TexasCrane]

Still pretty new to LR and I'm still not sure I understand how LightRoom thinks.......so my system hard drive crashed and I replaced it and i now need to reinstall LR3. Will that impact on my catalogues at all which are not on the system drive? Will it automatically recognize them? do I need to do anything like reimport the catalogue?

Just a thought, but you might want to consider keeping an image backup of your system drive.  I use acronis to backup my photo hard drive and my system hard drive nightly on my home network.  If either of those drives fails, I pop in a new one and can restore the image.  Within an hour or two, it's like nothing ever happened. No reinstalling of software, pointing to new catalog locations, etc.

-Derek