Elements Restore, Hard drive error

[Richard28448938d0te]

I upgraded to a new gaming computer and want to bring my Photoshop Elements Organizer over from my old computer. I'm using Windows 11, i7 processor, and Elements 2023. The software loaded fine.

I backed up Elements 12 from the old computer onto an extenal HD. I bought another extenal SSD HD (Crucial X8 2TB) that I wanted to use to restore the photo catalog to. I went to RESTORE, found the .tly file on the old computer, then selected the new X8 HD as my location to restore to. When I press RESTORE, I get 2 error messages:

1. One or more folders already exist with the same name as the folders being retored. This is odd since my new HD has nothing on it, but I just click past this, and then get another error message...

2. Error encountered while restoring catalog. It is recommended that you contact your disc drive manufacturer and upgrade to the latest available firmware for your specific disc drive before trying again. I looked on line at Crucial and there is no firmware upgrade. I can copy regular files to and from this drive. It has been given a drive letter (F:). 

This has left me stuck. I can't upload the the catalog from my backup. Does anyone know why I would be getting this error message, or how to make it recognize the new HD?

[Greg_S.]

Hi Richard.  Are both of your external drives of the same make and type?  Have you cloned one of them either from your original hard drive or whichever drive contained your original photos?  If so, there may be issues with the identification of the drive, which is one of the criteria that the Organizer uses to identify duplicate photos in the catalog.  I am going to ping @MichelBParis, another Community Expert, who knows a lot more about this than I do to see if he has some ideas for you.

In the meantime, you can try contacting Elements support. You can start a chat session by clicking on the blue Contact Us button under the Help & Support menu at Adobe.com. Or you can contact Support by telephone using the numbers listed here: https://helpx.adobe.com/contact/phone.html. Hours of operation outside of the United States are limited. See the phone link for details.

[Richard28448938d0te]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the reply. The external HD's are different. The original HD is an HHD 750GB Western Digital that is probably 5+ years old, formatted with NTFS. The new one is an SSD 2T formatted with exFAT. As an experiment, I copied the folder/files of the backup from the old external drive to an internal drive on my computer, just to see if that would help, but it didn't.

The original WD drive was the one that I backed up the catalog to from my old computer (an old windows XP with Elements 12). It also containes the original photos for the catalog.

[Test Screen Name]

Exfat is not a good idea. 

[Richard28448938d0te]

I reformatted the SSD drive to NTFS. No help.

Any ideas on why it's throwing that error message in the first place? What kind of firmware change would it be looking for?

[Richard28448938d0te]

Hi Greg,

Is there a way to chat with a real person? The chat button in the support page seems to just go to the virtual robot thing and is useless. I tired calling, but after an hour on hold, they answered and immediately disconnected. I guess that's one way to shorten the wait list!

[Greg_S.]

I can only suggest calling the telephone numbers in the list I gave you.  As I indicated, the support hours outside of the United States are limited to normal business hours in the region.  I don't know of any better way to contact support by telephone.  And outside the US, there is no support over the weekend.