HELP! I'm losing all my photos

[Catman]

Hi list. I urgently need help. I have many hundreds of photos, (some digital and some scanned in from roll film), that I recently spent weeks saving to CD's. Over the last few weeks I've found when opening these files I've started getting a "Read Failure" error warning and find that some files have been corrupted. I've tried repairing these files with Roxio Disc Scanner but to no avail and I end up losing the photos. When trying to open them my PC locks up. This sometimes happens just by inserting a CD with a corrupted file on it. Eventually I manage to delete the corrupted file but sooner or later more files become corrupted. I'm losing them all slowly. I've just found a complete CD with "all" the files corrupted. It's bad enough to lose the scanned images but the Digitals cannot be replaced.
Does anyone know what is happening and how I can prevent it?

[mikej]

possibilityy go bad if they were good to begin with. What is more likely is your CD drive is going bad or has gotten a dirty head (laser light). CD drives do go bad after awhile. The other posibility is that you did not get a good burn on the CD, again because of the CD going bad or because you burned to fast on a blank CD that wasn't rated for that speed.

You said you deleted them. Are they burned to a re-writable CD disk? If so, then the CD's are more susceptible to being corrupted. Most people never use the re-writables for storing. Only use the write once, which are burned to permanently. re-writable CDs are not permanent.

Try reading the CDs in another CD drive if you can. If so, copy them to the hard drive and reburn them out to another CD.

Mike

[scoundrel1728]

Some CD-R's don't retain their data very well to begin with, or possibly they are not fully compatible with your drive. If you can, make two copies your remaining images to discs of dissimilar brands so if one batch turns out bad as well, you still have the other. And, of course, discontinue recording on the trouble-prone batch of CD's.

Storage can also make a difference. Some CD-R's degrade quickly when left in the sunlight too long, for example.

[Catman]

Poblem has revealed it'self. My CD ROM packed up altogether today so I've got to get it repaired or replaced. Never-the-less, your advice has been taken on board. I won't use re-writable discs again just in case. I'm hoping to get a DVD ROM fitted soon and will still take your advice. Thanks a million for your advice.

[mikej]

I don't know why the first part of my message above was cut off, but you got most of it. And glad you figured out what was wrong.

Mike

[JDArt]

Bad disk drive was the best possible outcome. Likely that your data is okay.