To cut a long story short ... the original network drive was a Maxtor in RAID1.  When one of its HDD died, it instantly became unbootable.  Support told me there were no user replaceable drives inside and that as it was out of warranty to throw it away !   What's the point of RAID1 if you have to do that ? 

Instead I downloaded hacked firmware and rebuilt with two new HDDs, then re-loaded from a USB back-up drive.  Had been running fine again since.  But its NAS functionality is limited compared to modern devices and I wasn't prepared to repeat the exercise when a HDD died again.  So I bought a new NAS, moved the HDDs into it, re-formatted, and re-loaded my Catalog from the USB drive again (ie. not from the re-built drive but from a backup taken before it failed).  Downtime for the whole thing was about a fortnight which I could cope with.  But the new NAS has different reserved share-names (as well as a different volume #) so I couldn't use the original names that are in the Catalog and anyway I wanted to split the data between more than one share to exploit the additional functionality.  So when re-loading I put the images into a folder tree starting at the share-name root rather than one level lower.  I expected to have to do a lot of "re-connect missing file" operations. 

Instead I found that Organizer doesn't think they are disconnected, but off-line, so doesn't allow you to try re-connecting them.  Starting over with the missing tree level re-inserted isn't an option because I can't create the same root share-names on the new NAS anyway, and its volume # will still be different.  What looks to be needed is a way to get Organizer to accept the folders are online and allow me to re-connect the images, as if everything had happened on a local drive, not a network drive.

Any ideas gratefully received.

Thanks for the pointer - looks helpful.  The two obvious differences with my situation are:

(1) that my catalog is PSE7 rather than PSE9.  Would you expect this procedure to work similarly for PSE7 as for PSE9 ? 

(2) that the drive/volume in the db will have changed but so will the path (although the new path will be systematically derived from the original path so should be possible to simply strip a string out of the original path and substitute).  Is the path stored as a column of simple string data per image in the db ?

I've used SQL before but not for several years so willing to give this a go if it will work on PSE7. 

photodrawken wrote:

 

I wouldn't recommend altering those values, although it is tempting, because it would be very tedious (and prone to typo errors).  If the original SQL query in my link works for you, count your blessings and let the Organizer do all the reconnection work.

Thanks Ken.  SQLite works fine on PSE7 db.  Reveals a lot of junk data, despite the fact that the catalog was completely accurate on display until the mis-match between NAS paths.  As you'll see in another post, there appears to be a way to re-connect without editing the db via SQLite, so I'll try that first and maybe clean up the junk with SQLite afterwards (or maybe leave well alone) !

Thanks for your help.