Well it seems a problem I was having a couple of months ago is back. My laptop BSOD'd when attempting my first edits on my Indy photos the other night. A few more BSODs and it won't boot at all now without BSODing and rebooting itself.

Diags etc have been performed and I've just ordered a new HD for my laptop. Which means I now have to start down the path of getting everything back together. I have an external Seagate HD which has, hopefully, been dutifully performing the backups I set up so I'm not too worried there. Also I still have the HD and I don't think it's completely stuffed just some bad sectors looking at the diags.

So anyway when I pick up my new HD this afternoon, install Windows etc what is the best way to restore my Lightroom Catalogs?

I assume just dumping the Catalog and RAW directory structures back into the same locations and trying to use them might not work due to the underlying SQL Lite database etc. Or do people think this will work?

Most of the time before doing any serious work on the Catalog I have it prompt me for if I want to backup the Catalog or not and have a few versions of that available to me too. Is there some way to just restore from those and redo whatever I did that was lost?

Ideally I'd love to start again with Lightroom 2 but I figure it might be best to just get it back to where it was and then do the upgrade later rather than trying to overcomplicate the restore now.