HD reformatted, no access to photos in Lightroom

[Carrie5ED3]

My external hard drive had to be reformatted. Now, when I go into lightroom, my folders and sub folders have a "?" beside them.

How can i locate the location of the photos to have access to them again?

[LinSims]

Generally speaking, if you're going to reformat a hard drive you want to back-up all your files to an external location (external hard drive, Dropbox, Creative Cloud, that sort of thing) so that you can retrieve them later.

Assuming you did that and then retrieved them after the reformat but still can't locate them using Lightroom, I'm going to move this to the Lightroom forum in the hopes someone there can help you.

The Using the Community forum is for help in using the Adobe Support Community forums, not for help with specific programs. Product questions should be posted in the associated product community.

[Jim Wilde]

My external hard drive had to be reformatted. Now, when I go into lightroom, my folders and sub folders have a "?" beside them.

How can i locate the location of the photos to have access to them again?

By @Carrie5ED3

Presumably, therefore, your images were on the external hard drive that was reformatted, in which case the images are no longer there (the "?" on the folder and sub-folders means that Lightroom can no longer find them). So they have to be restored from a backup, assuming you do have a backup? Do you have a backup, and if so where is it?