new laptop - avoid downloading all originals

Hi,

I have a new laptop. All my originals or located an external drive and in sync with my cloud on my old laptop

When I open Lightroom I see al my pictures in the cloud and when I then change my preferences for my location to save the originals to my hard drive, lightroom is downloading the same files again to the same location

Is there no other way so that lightroom recognize the current originals on the hard drive and set them as "in sync" and not download 500gb of data?