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This is not strictly a techie question, but maybe someone can help. I have a CD of photo's to which I have often added more pictures. However last week, after I added a couple of photo's I was no longer able to access the earlier pictures. They are not even listed, only the new ones. The disc is not full. Any ideas?

If it's not an actual rewritable CD (CD-RW), then every time you write more photos to the drive, it is actually burning a whole new selection of stuff to the drive and creating a new "session." If you can't see the stuff that's on the drive from before, that usually means that it can't find the (multiple) table(s) of contents for those older sessions, or perhaps the total number of sessions is too large for the drive to play nice with. In that case, the data are still on the drive, but the drive might be ignoring them for whatever reason.

The takeaway from this is that you should treat CDs as one-time-use media. Get everything together you want on that CD, burn it once at the slowest speed possible*, and be done with it rather than adding to it repeatedly.

--Patrick
*This improves its chances of lasting a long time.

I would start making backups onto something like Dropbox.

And I hope you didn't lose anything you can't get back.

Are you wanting to recover the missing photos, or are you just wanting to know what went wrong?

What disc type are you using?
What software are you using to write, and if you're not using software what is the process you follow to add pictures?[DOUBLEPOST=1479439057,1479438899][/DOUBLEPOST]Here is one possible resource:

http://superuser.com/questions/369224/how-to-recover-data-from-previous-sessions-in-a-cd-or-dvd

You can find similar answers by searching for "cd data recovery" "cd session recovery".[DOUBLEPOST=1479439254][/DOUBLEPOST]You can also copy the complete binary data off the CD then use software to search for data from the binary image. It's not straightforward, but if the above doesn't provide means then there are other options, though more difficult to pursue.

Thank you all for your hints. For the record: Disc is CD-R. Object recover pics. Sent to disc from "My Pictures" in XP.

I will try your suggestions and see what happens.

Best of luck.

--Patrick

Success!!! Thanks to you Patrick, but not quite the way you might think. When you mentioned using a slower speed it got me thinking. I put the dodgy disc into the 52X computer drive and using a plug in 40X drive made a copy disc using "Nero" ( A multi purpose disc program.) Apart from some photos being in different order I have recovered the lot.

Grytpipe-Thynne said:

Success!!! Thanks to you Patrick, but not quite the way you might think. When you mentioned using a slower speed it got me thinking. I put the dodgy disc into the 52X computer drive and using a plug in 40X drive made a copy disc using "Nero" ( A multi purpose disc program.) Apart from some photos being in different order I have recovered the lot.

Click to expand...

You're right, it's not the way I was thinking.
Although trying a different drive is always one of the first things to try with any dodgy removable medium (floppy, CD, Bernoulli, Syquest, etc).
I still recommend that, if you want your disc to last as long as possible, you should burn it at the slowest speed your drive supports. It's one thing to run off a quick copy for a friend/relative, but if you want those photos to survive decades buried in a box in your closet, you want that initial burn to be as precise and unhurried as possible.

--Patrick

Noted.