LR catalouge question

[mamato3]

OK, I'm admitting it... my files are disorganized. But I see the error of my ways and I resolve to be better!! I had to go back and fix a lot of messy stuff, though.
First of all, before making any changes, I made 2 back up copies of all my images. Then, I went into my main drive and did an overhaul - deleted unwanted items and rearranged my folders so they make sense.

I know that Lightroom won't be able to find anything now, so I'm wondering, can I replace the catalogue with the new, more organized folders and what would be the best way to do this?
Hopefully this makes sense.

[Victoria Bampton]

So you've already done all this moving? Ich! If someone else is going to try this, select all in Grid view and hit Ctrl-S/Cmd-S to write to xmp first. It helps!

So Vicki, how much work had you already done in LR, if any? If you've done loads of work, you'll want to go relink each of the files in turn. If you haven't done any, just create a new catalog and import as usual.

[mamato3]

So you've already done all this moving? Ich! If someone else is going to try this, select all in Grid view and hit Ctrl-S/Cmd-S to write to xmp first. It helps!

So Vicki, how much work had you already done in LR, if any? If you've done loads of work, you'll want to go relink each of the files in turn. If you haven't done any, just create a new catalog and import as usual.

YIKES! Well, lots of work done in LR, but I mostly open in CS3 and save from there. Jeez, I wish I'd posted this before I started moving things. I don't think there was many just hanging out with LR adjustments, if that makes sense.
I see your links - I'm going to check those out.

I have all the original mess (unmoved files) on a seperate hard drive, not sure if I can do anything with that first. Aahh...

[Victoria Bampton]

If there's not much with LR adjustments, I'd import into a new catalog, and see if you can spot the ones you've missed.

Or here's an idea that could work....

Open your old catalog and sort by edit count or something along those lines - I'm thinking that if you can get all of those with LR adjustments together, you could relink just those one, select them once they're relinked, ctrl-S to write to xmp, and then import everything into your new catalog. You'd be missing anything that isn't stored in xmp (flags, history, collections mainly) but your develop settings etc would be in the new catalog then.