Damaged external hard drive

[Nancy Carol Photography]

My WD external hard drive dropped on the wood floor and no longer works! I have Back Blaze as my other backup source.  They sent a temp hard drive of my Lightroom images for which I copied onto a new 4T LaCie.  I made a new folder inside LR and imported all (30k) my images from the LaCie.  I right-clicked the folder to notify LR of "Update Folder Location."  From there it does not allow the LaCie to be the new location and an error message comes up.  

Can someone walk me through what to do?  Is what I already did correct?  All help articles do not address what to do when the original hard drive becomes broken.

{Moved from Lightroom Cloud to Lightroom Classic Forum by Moderator} 

[Rob_Cullen]

"I made a new folder inside LR and imported all (30k) my images

Is what I already did correct?"

No or Yes - Depending on what you have to 'work' with.

If you have your Catalog file (or one from a recent Backup), and your photo files are in the same folder and filename structure as before (NOT recovered files), then the correct answer would be to- Open the Catalog and 'Locate missing folders' and "Find Missing Photos".

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-photos-missing-fix/

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/disaster-strikes-corrupted-catalog/#restore

If you do NOT have your previous Catalog (or from a Backup) and your recovered files are in a new folder structure, then there is little more that you can do other than to import and start over again with everything afresh.

"Update Folder Location." will mean nothing, and do nothing, for the photos you have newly re-imported to the Catalog. That also depends on 'How' you re-imported (by Copy or Add)!

See this forum link for a similar scenario to yours (referring to "Folder Tree")-

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic/lost-the-entire-folder-tree/td-p/9663237?page=1

[Nancy Carol Photography]

Thank you for the quick reply! I did get the folders back and in a
workable fashion but all the Collections are still indicating the
exclamation mark. How do I remedy that?

[Rob_Cullen]

"the Collections are still indicating the exclamation mark"

Collections or Photo thumbnails?

I have never seen a Collection with an exclamation mark! and missing folders show with a question mark [?]

Some screen-clips would help greatly to show what you are seeing and help a diagnosis.