Lightroom Photos disappeared when backing up to external hard drive

[Jamie5E28]

Hi - I was moving my raw files to a external hard drive and photos in my collection disappeared.

I did 2 things:

1. Dragged images from my hard drive to my external hard drive
2. I removed export folders that were no longer needed (wondering if this deleted my photos/edits)

See screenshot. I am freaking out. How do I get my photos with edits back? 

There are some photos in there but my older edits were removed. You can see in the second pic I have over 8000 photos. when I go there it seems like a folder is missing.

Wondering if anyone has any suggestions OR if you know of any lightroom expert (legit) services I can contact. Adobe won't help me because they dont support Lightroom 5. I feel like I need 30 minutes with an expert and a screenshare to untangle this mess I created.

Thank you in advance!

[JP Hess]

It appears to me that you moved the images to the external hard drive, and didn't use Lightroom to do it. Consequently, Lightroom no longer knows where the images are located and considers them all as missing. I will provide you a link to an article that I think will help you straighten things out. Pay particular attention to part 2 which discusses how to update the folder location. I believe that is what you need to do.

Adobe Lightroom - Find moved or missing files and folders (computer-darkroom.com)