Replacing hard drive without affecting catalog?

[gallerybill]

All of my images are in one Lightroom Classic catalog with images residing on an external SATA hard drive.  I have to replace that hard drive with a new SSD drive which is a backup of the original SATA drive.  What problems might I face when making that swap?  Suggestions on making that go smoothly.

[dj_paige]

You shouldn't have any problems if you simply duplicated the drive, with folder hierarchy unchanged.

If the drive has a different name (Mac) or different letter (Windows), then you should give the new drive the EXACT same name as the old one or the same letter as the old one.

A mistake some people make is they take this opportunity to tinker with the folder hierarchy to make it more to their liking. DO NOT DO THIS.

[gallerybill]

Problem solved, thanks so much.  

[JP Hess]

A while back I replaced my spinning hard drive with a SSD. The old hard drive was still working, so we were able to clone the whole operating system, my applications and my Lightroom catalog to the new SSD before we installed it. All my images are on other hard drives. The switch was seamless. As soon as the new drive was installed, everything worked as expected.