I have plex installed to an external hard drive (named Y: drive) that is attached to my desktop machine. This is where I installed it because my internal drive did not have the buffer space for transcoding for downloads.
The Y: drive is starting to die and is constantly locking up and disconnecting. I have bought a new external drive to replace it and have copied data off the original drive (including the plex install location and folders). It looks like simply copying everything is not enough as plex does not seem to recognize the install and shows no media when I remove the old drive and replace it with the new one (all the same data and drive letter).
How do I get it to recognize the new drive as the original install location?
the location of the Plex executable files (the “program” folder). This is what I assume you are meaning when talking about “installing Plex to location X”.
the location of the Plex data folder. This is located by default on drive C:, unless you move it explicitly.
the location of the actual media files
Changing 1) doesn’t make much sense, since it is only about 200 MB large and may also cause weird behavior under some circumstances. Leave it always on drive C: in the default location.
Now 2) is the right choice when you want to save the data which was collected by Plex server about your media. (Posters, descriptions, playback statistics etc.pp.)
In other words: if you never changed the location of the plex data folder, you should still find every thing on drive C:
But there is another aspect to this: inside the Plex data folder is also stored the location where Plex can find your media files.
If you now moved all media files from drive Y: to e.g. drive Z: you theoretically have to change this drive letter for each and every media file inside the Plex database.
That of course is a drag, but there is an easier approach:
Simply change the drive letter of the new drive to be Y: (after removing the old drive, of course): https://www.howtogeek.com/96298/assign-a-static-drive-letter-to-a-usb-drive-in-windows-7/
That way, as far as Plex is concerned, nothing has changed and every media file can still be found in the same location as before.
I was able to successfully copy everything from my plex media server folder (that was a TON of files) to the new drive and assign it the same drive letter. Everything is working as good as new.
I think when I initially attempted this, I may not have copied everything from that folder totally so it wasn’t working.
