Can somebody please explain this to me?

[Soni]

Hello, this is my first post so please forgive me if i'm posting in the wrong section!

I've just upgraded my machine from a Packard Bell P4 - Dell XPS420 Quad Core and have discovered something that i cannot explain.

I have hundreds of family photographs on CD, which i have backed up over the last 3-4 years.

I made sure all photos and folders were copied onto each CD when originally written to disc.

Now i have my new PC, i've been browsing some of the photos this evening, and was shocked when i opened some of the folders and there are NO photos....

Its not only one CD either, i have around 3-4 cd's out of around 10, and on each one as many as 4 folders are compeltely empty, but there are also some folders on the same CD that have photos in them.

I even right clicked and checked the properties and it said '0 bytes'.

I was really annoyed as there were loads of photos of my 2 daughters when babies, that have completely dissapeared.

I then went to the old PC which i have now given to my daughter, and put the same CD's in that PC, and i was pleasantly surprised and VERY happy when they became visible.

Why is this? It doesn't seem to be logical.....

I can understand if it was something to do with a view setting, but i clicked properties and it said '0 bytes.

The old PC was a 5 year old Packard Bell P4, 512MB RAM, 80GB Hard Drive, running Windows XP Media Centre, and the new PC is a DELL, 2 Quad Core, 4GB RAM, 2 x 320GB Hard Drives, running VISTA.

The old PC had a CD Re-Writer and seperate DVD read only drive, i wrote the files obviously in the CD Re-Writer.

The new PC just has a DVD Re-Writer......

Any ideas anybody?

I am so worried now that i'm going to make sure i have hard copoies of all my treasured photos

[Soni]

Some more information....

The files were written to the CD on the old machine using Explorer, i draged and dropped the files to the CD Drive letter, it then came up with 'you have files waiting to be written to the CD blah blah blah' and i clicked the icon, and it then asks you to type in a title for the CD, and then goes off and does its writing, and then ejects the CD at the end.

But, i don't 'think' its a problem with the way i've written it due to the following:-

On each CD i have x amount of different folders, and then in each folder i have x amount of pictures.

One of the CD's has something like 6 folders, 4 of which are completely empty according to my new machine, and 2 of which have photos in them.

All the folders were written to the CD at the same time and in the same way, drag and drop.

I didn't drag the shortcut, i used explorer and copied the actual folder including the files.

And every single photo file on each of the CD's and in each of the folders was taken with the same camera set to the same settings and saved saved as the same file formet i.e., .jpg.

Also, i've since done a complete reformat and fresh install of XP Media Centre Edition on my old machine for my daughter and deleted the partition etc., so everything that was on the old machine has now gone, and when i put the CD's i'm having problems with in the old machine, it calls every folder up and every photo fine.....

I'm just worried which way to turn now, cause if i network the 2 PC's to transfer the photos from the old CD drive onto the new PC and write the files to a new CD using the new PC, is this going to be OK, or is it a problem with the new PC and therefore i'm going to have problems with viewing them again in the future?

I wouldn't normally mind, but i'm a bit of a sentimental person and don't want to loose my childrens photos.

[Steve]

Hi Soni,

first of all make sure that you get a backup of the photos from the CD's onto a hard drive or USB Memory key via the XP PC. If a CD goes ( cracks, scratch or just old age ) so are your photos.

The only thing I can think of is that the new PC is having a hard time reading the CDs especially if you can see some but not others.

Get them backed up onto a USB Memory key and then see if these folders appear on the Vista PC when the USB Memory Key is inserted,

Hope this helps,

regards

Steve