Robert,
You should have a look at this thread :
In Photolab database, drives are not identified by drive letter but by the drive UUID (a universally unique ID attached the drive). The copy of the DB that you will copy to the new drive of the new laptop contains records referencing the UUID of the drives of the old laptop. When launching DPL will also discover that a “new” drive is present (new, unknown UUID) and will scan it when opening or indexing the “new” folders (although the data are already present in the old database). So, you’ll find yourself with a database containing duplicate entries for the same files : an entry for the file present on the old disk and another one corresponding to the same file “re-discovered” on what is considered as a new disk.
This will lead to a messy situation where the database contains different sets of settings for a given file. There’s no workaround for this issue. I discovered this problem when copying the Photolab database from my PC to a laptop . Big mess generated although the photos were stored in folders having the same drive letter. And obviously, I was not alone (many thanks to BHAYT).
Just delete the database on the new laptop and re-index your photo folders. This process will re-create a new database that will take your existing .dop files into account. The only problem is that you will lose your existing DPL projects.
Also, never copy a DPL database created on a given device to another device, even if the drives have the same letter. Just copy the image files and the associated DOP files.
Only people having a good knowledge of SQLite programming can sort this out by writing SQL code. And that’s not an easy task.