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A lot of points you have raised, many of which I cannot answer!

As far as I know Roxio Easy CD is the formatting program but I have only ever used Nero (for burning) and Nero InCD (for formatting); perhaps a Roxio user will advise.

Why are your photos so large? They needn't be unless you want enormous detail for A4 printing purposes. I always limit my photos, whether from digicam or downloaded or scanned to anywhere between 50kb to 200kb which allows fast writing/reading and I don't print very often. I believe your very large images might put a strain on writing (burning) facilities, but I don't know. Any photo can be reduced in size with an imaging program; I use Arcsoft Photo Studio but you can play around with sizes (and have a slide show if you want) with the free Irfanview from www.irfanview.com

Going back to burning, the slower the write speed the more dependable the result; I have an old, slow, but extremely reliable CD writer which I use to burn at 2X or sometimes 4X. Obviously it takes longer but so what? As I said before I format disks (CD-RWs) with Nero InCD and you really can read, write, rename etc just like with a hard disk; if you delete something then it is gone but if you confine yourself to backups only then you have the chance to replace. You can add/delete folders/files as many times as you like, until the dreaded 'backup and reformat' message appears - which you ignore at your peril! I have found that it is best to insert and delete CD-RWs while the PC is on - I mean do not leave the disk in the drive when off. Incidentally, if you did decide to format you can eject a disk only by right-clicking the taskbar icon (showing red when empty, green when a disk is inserted), or from My Computer, drive letter, eject. Speed does not apply with a formatted disk as you are not 'burning', only 'copying'.

Sorry I can't advise on how to recover your images but I think you should look into reducing file size and burning speed if you want better reliability when burning data (which photos are, normally).

Just re-read your post: when 'burning' DATA I find with Nero Express (nice and easy) that single or multiple sessions are quite OK.
The main object of formatted disks is convenience.
I use an external hard disk (USB1) for main storage and formatted CD-RWs for the backup. Obviously using an internal hard disk is just as good, and even better for backups. As always don't keep everything on one disk, whatever its type.
If you have a series of photos that you want to preserve indefinitely then use 'burning' to a little used CD and look after it carefully - scratches will eventually shorten its life (and hard disks can suddenly fail!) so maybe have a carefully selected CD (or two or three) of little used permanent storage.

God luck in the future.

johnni
 
Direct CD is supposed to format a CD-R ( and I guess RW, I don't use them) so that you can use them like a floppy (cut -n-paste / drag-n-drop). Of course with a CD-R you can only use it until it's filled up. It's a good idea but I never used it much because it didn't work reliably. I'm not sure what the others are talking about when saying they "format" a CD. I think possibly that different burning programs use different "terminology" for things. I always thought "format" just meant that the program writes certain data and files to the CD to make it readable in all optical drives. In some programs like Easy CD Creator you have a couple of choices when you burn. Media Creator 7 has something similar to Direct CD called "Drag to Disc". I haven't use it much but it seems to work better than the former "Direct CD". I've found that if you only want to use the CD on the same PC that you burned it on Direct CD works okay, but if you want to use the CD in any PC then burn it using the regular program window. I have 3 PC's sitting here so I always use the last method. A little info, Media Creator 7 is not just a burning program but a suite of interacting media programs (image editor, video editor, sound editor, etc,) so it's fairly expensive ($90) I think Roxio makes a new stand alone burning program but I'm not sure and I don't know if it comes with the repair feature.
If you are using a 3 or more mega pixel digital camera and have it set to the finest (best) setting the files will be over a meg. . How much content or detail there is in the picture will determine the size. Example: A picture file of many trees will be larger in file size (more data) than a picture of one tree shot with the same camera settings. If you are scanning the pictures and using a higher resolution (say 300 dpi instead of the standard 200) then of course you will get a much larger file size. Scanning is a little tricky, a higher dpi is not always better depending on the size of the hard photo. Wallet sized photos scanned at a high dpi may look weird. You have to experiment with the dpi.
What you want to use the pictures for should be the determining factor. If you may want to print it, bigger is better. I always shoot and scan pictures at the highest settings just in case I want to print it later, I can always copy them and resize the copy down if I want to Email it. If I know I'm scanning a photo in order to print it I will also save it in a non-compressed file format such as .png or .bmp. or .tif , so as not to lose data. With a digital camera you can use the .raw format for this if you have an editor that supports it. If not then you have to use the .jpg, I don't know what compression ratio or type that cameras use but I'd imagine it's low.
Hope this was helpful, sorry about your lost data.
 
R dics, CD-R etc, do not have to be formatted, only RW, CD-RW etc. If you have more than 1 packet writing program on your computer, InCD and Drag to Disc fro example, they will literally fight with each other and cause lots of problems. I agree with others, do not use RW anythings, they cause the most problems with home players, both stand-alone and computer. Discs are so cheap now, better to end up with a few coasters than risk using RWs! Good luck.
 
Discussion starter · #24 ·
Thanks everyone for the valuable info. I still have not been able to retrieve my photos, but at least I gained a lot of valuable knowledge of what NOT to do next time. I’m going through old discs trying to extract some files from past sessions. I have also located some chucks of photos here and there, which I had sent copies to friends and families. In the end hopefully, not much will remain at large. Thanks Again!
 
I have been having exactly the same problems but fortunatly had the burner that I used to burn the photo files laying around (a Cheap LG, CD/RRW).

At a last ditch attempt I hooked it up and and low and behold the pictures are now available for preview.

It is as if the last few nights trying magically make them appear was a complete waste of time.

Also when trying to look at pictures before they had small 'thumb.db' attached in each folder. In the CD/RW the 'thumbs.db' have all gone and everything is back to normal. Panic over, if you can give it a try you might get lucky!!
 
There are a couple of programs that could help. One is PC inspector (Smart Recovery) that I have used to recover damaged photos. http://www.snapfiles.com/get/pcinspector.html You will need another drive or partition, because the recovered images cannot go onto the drive with the original images.

The other is IrfanView which can open many different filetypes, and can recognize and correct improperly named formats. This is not a big help if the images are damaged.
http://www.irfanview.com
 
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