Lightroom mobile can only sync to one catalog at a time, and of course Lightroom mobile doesn't know that you've deleted the one catalog that it was syncing to, hence no current sync activity. If you make sure that you are running LR CC 2015.8 on your laptop, you can then take advantage of a new feature in that version, called Sync Catalog Recovery. Unlike all previous versions, 2015.8 now allows you to switch sync to a different catalog without first having to delete all previously synced data from the Adobe servers. So, open you new catalog (don't import anything from the external drive), then enable sync (open the Activity Centre by clicking in the Identity Plate area, then click on Start on the Sync with LR mobile line). You should then get a message asking you to confirm that you want to switch syncing to the new catalog, click OK on that and wait.....all the currently synced images will then be downloaded. The neat bit is that if you had previously synced images from LR on the laptop/desktop, only smart previews are in fact uploaded to the Adobe servers, BUT if you haven't messed with the file/folder structure of your images on the external drive, LR will attempt to map the smart previews back to the original images, which if successful will result in the respective folders appearing in the new catalog, and you'll have access to the original files again. I've done some testing of this feature, and while I wouldn't say it's bomb-proof (i.e. you might see a few errors), it just might get you out of the hole that you dug for yourself.
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