# Reinstall Lightroom and Data



## krypton (Aug 17, 2019)

Ok, I fell victim to the new Windows update and had to reinstall the entier OS wiping my hard drive... all bad and ugly. The good news is all of my lightroom catalog, preferances, data and presets are backed up to a separate hard drive....all good.
My question is then. How do I restablish those broken locations and in port backup data into the fresh instsll. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you Charlie


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## clee01l (Aug 18, 2019)

You should never need to reformat your Primary drive to install a Windows update.   However since you did, Here's what you need to do to get LR right.

Download and install the latest version of LR for your license. 
Copy your backed up LR catalog file to the location that you want it to be maintained
Copy the folder structure and master image copies to the location that they were on the old system.  Usually this is the Windows Pictures folder but it does not have to be so.
Double click on the newly restored Lightroom Catalog file to open Lightroom.
If you see that your master images are in the catalog but the path is not correct,
right click on the top level folder in the  folder panel and choose "Update Folder Location..." from the dropdown menu.
In the system dialog that opens, navigate and choose the location where the folder now resides.


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## krypton (Aug 19, 2019)

Thank you so much. The windows issue started back in June with the first update and then the second update only made it worse. After hours on the phone with Microsoft engineers they flet a fresh install was necessary. Good for me all my data was on seveal external hard drives. Thank you so much for helping me sort through this Charlie


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