Yes—your Lightroom edits should be safe as long as the catalog remains intact and you relink the photo locations if needed. The main thing Lightroom cares about is where the original files live on disk.

Best practice: keep the same folder structure when copying the photos to the new or reformatted drive. If Lightroom sees the same relative layout, the move is usually straightforward.

If Lightroom shows folders or images as missing after the move, you can point Lightroom to the new location. Once you relink a missing folder or image, it will often find the rest automatically if the structure is unchanged.

An even safer approach is to use Lightroom itself to move folders, because that updates the catalog as it goes and avoids path mismatches.

So, in short:

• preserve the catalog
• keep the folder hierarchy the same
• if files appear missing, use Lightroom to locate them
• using Lightroom to perform the move is ideal when possible

Your edits are stored in Lightroom’s catalog, so moving the photo files does not remove the edits as long as the catalog is preserved and the files are reconnected.