I have a question that I HOPE someone can answer for me. I have been working on photo's and then saving them to my hard drive. I got a little nervous about putting all that information there in case of a crash and thought it would be a good idea to move them over to a CD. I saved them all in "Direct CD" It is a drag and drop type of software program from "Adaptec", now known as "Roxio" I burned the pix after formatting the CD and then worked with the same CD a few times more with no problem. I decided to do a contact sheet in Photoshop to document what I had on the CD and I ended up with the file thumbnails and names and thought I was ready to rock. WELL!!!!!!!! I put the CD in my burner the other day and a bunch of the pix are missing. Where did they go?????? I e-mailed Roxio and they never bothered to mail back. I am TOTALLY lost. It was alot of work, maybe around 15 restorations. I used windows explorer and yep, they are gone. HELP!!!!:depressed :eek: :(

Marni

Sorry to hear about your misfortune Marni. I don't have an answer for you, but I had several photos on a CD, then I got a message that the CD somehow came up with an error on it, and the some of the photos could not be accessed. Luckily, I still had them on my hard drive. After hearing about your experience, and experiencing my own, I'll make sure that I have a copy on my hard drive, or at least on more than one CD. Sorry I couldn't help.

Ed

Hey Marni,
Did you try putting it in the regular CD drive instead of the burner?
DJ

I wish I could offer more concrete help, but there are troubleshooters available here (http://www.roxio.com/en/support/dcdwin/index.html) that might help you out. The second and third items would seem to me to be your best bet.

I don't think this would apply to your case Marni, but just an FYI to others, I used to use an external HP CD-RW.

I found out the hard way that when the CD fills up you get no warning whatsoever and it automatically erases what you had on there the next time you go to burn something on.

After that until I got a different CD-RW I stopped burning onto my CD's at about 50 megs short of what they would normally hold.

I couldn't believe there wasn't something in the software or hardware that would tell you the disk was full like the floppy or zip drives do...but there wasn't.

I lost 2 CD's worth of stuff before I figured out what the heck was going on.

Marni, I have seen that happen with the Adaptec version. First, Try cleaning the face of the CD with a CD cleaning kit such as is made for music CD's. If the pictures are still missing try doing this two or three times. I encountered this problem with CD's created with a Gateway computer and the Adaptec version of the software you are using. If the pictures open, immediatly download them to your desktop and thence the hard drive. Trying the CD ROM instead of the CD RW is an excellent suggestion also. The only way I found to prevent this from occuring with that particular computer and software combination was to use the WIZARD portion of the program to "burn" from. At the time this happened repeated calls to the computer manufacturer and Adaptec were VERY unsuccessful. There seems to be a problem with either the CD Burner or the software but I couldnot get a straight answer. This computer belonged to the local Photographer and fortunatly we were able to salvage the contents of 5 CD's by using what I called the "scrub" method. Apparently this problem has not been totally eliminated. Hope this helps. Tom

Marni; Just me again. Also, I dont know what brand of CD's you are using but I only use Memorex as certain others I tried with two different brands of CD RW drives would not always burn properly, sometimes locking up the computer!!! Tom

Chris, Take a look at the SONY line of external CD RW drives. With their software you get a graphic display of how full the disc is and it wont allow you to begin burning unless there is enough disc space. I use one and have not had any trouble with it although when you install the software for it be sure and unplug ALL other external devices from your computer except for the Monitor,mouse and keyboard AND turn off any virus software or the drivers willnot install correctly. Tom

Hi Tom,

I just had to try the color thing..lol.

Dont' need to worry now about that HP external as my new computer has an internal and thus far all is well...knocking on wood as I speak.

But thanks for the info.
:thumbsup:

Marni, Did you get your pic's back? If this occurs again you might consider having a Tech. check out the CD RW drive as if the head or someother part is going bad you could see the same symptom you experienced. Just a thought. Tom

Marni. You left us hanging. How did this situation work out?

Marni,

I really don't know what suggestion to give you with this particular problem. But what I HAVE suggested in the past is this:



You can go ahead and burn your information onto CD's, but also TEST the cd on another machine to see that it wrote on there properly before taking it off the Hard Drive.

Since CD's are so cheap, if you make changes, just go ahead and burn your new information onto new CD's.


The way *I* do it is this way:

I name the CD Volume as that day's date, and name the files appropriately.
I go ahead and do the work, drag and drop the information onto the CD. (Then I grab a beer and watch the Astros)

I then (grab a beer) and look at the CD and check to see if the information is actually there.

Go to another one of my machines and test the CD on that one (and sometimes upload it to my server), whereupon, I grab another beer.

You cannot believe how often I tell users that they must back up a back up.
But then again, I'm rather anal about these kind of measures since I've dealt with people that had catastrophic data loss and in a business, that be very costly.


Rick

<tosses two pennies on the table and grabs a beer>

Sorry I forgot about replying!!! Bad girl!! anyway, no, data STILL missing, BUT I found it lurking on my hard drive and I think I am having a senior moment (although I am not a senior)!!! I might be having hallucinations, I really am not sure, but viola.......there were the files. I IMMEDIATELY burned them onto a CD (Not a CDRW). Interesting thought, I saw on some web site something about never leaving a disc in the drive when you shut off the computer. It said that the CD writes some finishing information before ejecting, so maybe that is what happened. I know that I am technically challenged BIG TIME!! LOL LOL. Anyway, I learned my lesson about CDRW. Use the CD media and data loss will be at a minimum (I think). Thanks to all who responded.