Alas I have run out of disk space on my D: drive and need to move my lightroom pictures to another drive. Every time I have tried this in the past I have run into a mess in that LR tells me it can't find the photos and I had to click on each and every photo to show it the new locations. I have way too many photos to do that anymore, thus I need some help to get this right the first time. I would like to move everything from my D: drive to my R: drive. How do I do this so as to not mess things up. Do I do this by moving the files with windows explorer or do I do it in lightroom. What has to be done so LR immediately sees everything in the new location with no problems?

you MUST move the files/folders from WITHIN Lightroom via the LIbrary module, left side

where 'must' means 'if you dont want to endlessly 'fix' things'

Or you move them outside of Lightroom and relink them. If you're going to do that, make sure the folders are in a nice tidy hierarchy so that you only need to relink the top level folder.

I've done it before in a nice tidy hierarchy but it still made me rerecognize each directory and even each picture in the directory

How did you do it before then? You have to right-click on the parent folder and relocate that. If you do a subfolder or single image first, it'll make you do them all individually.

Oh, I see the right-click option now - Don't think it was there when I last tried it in old version 1.4. So if my pictures are in a directory called d:\LR pictures\2008\ do I create a directory R:\LR Pictures\ and then relocate "d:\LR Pictures\2008\" there or do I just relocate "d:\LR Pictures\2008\" to R:\ ??

If you can see the LR Pictures folder in the hierarchy, then you just right click on that and point it to R:\LR Pictures and you should be all set.

One tip - duplicate or back up your catalog before you transfer, and then if you mess it up, you just put your backup back!