# Disaster has struck indeed-corrupted catalog



## Ewokchef (Sep 7, 2018)

I'm working with classic cc 7.5 on a windows 10 laptop.  I need step by step stuff.  I'm not as computer savvy as I thought I was and my brain is aging by the minute. I have tried to put the photos themselves in an  external hard drive, labeled "F" on my laptop.  My desktop computer has had some kind of hard drive failure and I don't know if that affected the corruption or not.  I've followed the steps from a post titled "Disaster strikes"   Disaster strikes - a corrupted catalog! | The Lightroom Queen  or at least I think I have.  {I'm also backed up to Carbonite, btw.}  I am still getting the error message "cannot repair corrupt catalog." 

I don't know what I've done wrong.  Can anyone help?  
​Sharon​


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## TimWatts (Sep 11, 2018)

Hi Sharon,

Did you ever allow LR to make a catalogue backup on exit? If so, can you find those on disk?

Cheers, Tim


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## Ewokchef (Sep 12, 2018)

Yes, I have backups, Tim.  I can't seem to get the backup to work.  I did spend a few hours today with Adobe tech support.  Unfortunately they couldn't figure it out either.  They were able to find a catalog that i could open but not my originals and not all the images.  I haven't given up.


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## TimWatts (Sep 12, 2018)

Hi,

OK - so catalogue file is probably OK in itself (or at least one of the backups is). But you cannot locate your photos?

'scuse granny-egg-suck - I'm not sure what you already know...

So - the photos don't live in the catalogue but are outside. But the catalogue maintains a link to the files:
If it cannot find them, either they're gone, or they somehow got moved, or the drive they were on is not available and/or it's name/drive letter changed.

I suspect the latter as you have an external drive.

If you plug that drive in, and stay OUT of LR, but look at the drive with a file manager (eg My PC/Computer/Explorer) - can you see images on the drive?
If you imported the photos from the external drive, you had the option to: 

a) Move then to internal storage;
b) Copy them to internal storage;
c) Leave them on the drive and just let LR build catalogue entries for them. 

Can you remember how you originally imported them?


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 15, 2018)

Hi Sharon, ok, let's separate the two problems.
1. It says your catalog is corrupted. 
2. You're trying to move the photos.

Let's start with the corrupted catalog, because you can't do anything until that's fixed. So you've found your backup catalog ok? And it was probably zipped up because it's a recent one (when I wrote those instructions, they weren't zipping backups). So have you unzipped the backup? And when you double click on it to open it into Lightroom, what happens?


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## Ewokchef (Sep 15, 2018)

It says "relaunch Lightroom with this catalog?  In order to use this catalog, LR must close the current catalog and restart.  do you want to relaunch lightroom with F:\photo library\LightroomCatalog.lrcat\Lightroom Catalog.lrcat"

Yes, I did unzip it but I really don't know what I'm doing.  Just FYI, F is my external hard drive.


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 15, 2018)

That's absolutely fine, it's just asking permission to close whatever catalog is open and open the backup instead.


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## Ewokchef (Sep 15, 2018)

Okay so I will do that and let you know what happens then.


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## Ewokchef (Sep 15, 2018)

Okay It opened from that lcat folder into  in my "D" drive and shows  73K photos  there.  but with question marks on everything. when i tell it to find missing folder (right click) (it shows  35K photos 

Now it says, the selected folder or one of its subfolders is already in LR.  Do you want to combine these folders?  Then I have merge or cancel as choices.


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## Ewokchef (Sep 16, 2018)

I can definitely merge them but not until someone says it's safe.


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## Johan Elzenga (Sep 17, 2018)

Merging is something that only happens in the catalog. Nothing else happens. So as long as you have a catalog backup, it is perfectly safe.


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