Hi Folks,
Thought I'd post this here, as I know there are a number of tech type people out there who might be able to help. My old computer was due for replacement, and the new Dell is now up and running. All my photos were stored on an external hard drive, so I didn't anticipate any problems accessing them with the new one. On my old system, the external drive was designated the "G" drive. On the new one, the external drive has a "K" designation. When I go to the "K" drive, there is a folder called "recent items" that appears to contain my photos, however, when I try to open a photo, I receive a message asking me to insert a disk into drive "G". Do I need to rename all the photos so they can be read from the K drive? Any other suggestions? Thanks.
John

the recent items folder contains shortcuts or references to the file whose name it displays, not the actual file. The shortcut was created when the external drive was labeled 'G' and so the short cut is pointing to the 'G' drive. I would assume that there is another folder on this drive that contains the actual files. Do a search (start menu >> search), look for "all files or folders" type in *.tif or something else that should locate your files and choose the 'k' drive to search within.

The search should return the location of your files. It is probably in something like k:\documents and settings\the banana\my documents\my pictures.

I hate microsoft's dumbing down.

Most likely your external drive will not have the \documents and settings... path. But, the folder where you stored your photos should be accessable as "K:\" + the folder name. What is in the "recent items" folder are shortcuts to the actual files. You could reset the external drive's drive letter so that it is "G" instead of "K", then the shortcuts would work.
However you should be able simply browse to the actual folder. If you don't know the name of the folder, then a search as JD suggested should get you there, or else highlight one of the "recent items" shortcuts, then choose "properties" under the "File" menu, then note where it says the original is stored, it will say "g:\"...something or another. If you type that into a Windows Explorer window substituting "K" for "G" you should see your photos.

Hm..I have a feeling that something bad has happened. Searches as per JD's and bdial's suggestion have failed to find tiff's or jpegs. However, there is no logical reason for the files not to be there, so it's puzzling. The good news is that nearly all my photos are also on disk, but I'd rather not go through the process to load them all again if I can help it. Might be the only solution though.

if you are runing a windows OS the file extensins would most likely be 3 char's as in jpg and tif. If you include the wildcard '*' and the '.' asin *.tif you should find something even if it isn't your files.

bdial's suggestion to check the properties of the shortcut should work the easiest. Right mouse on the shortcut, select properties, under 'target' you will see the path to the file. Simply replace the drive letter 'g' with 'k' and you should be in business.

I have a feeling that something bad has happened
It's too soon to panic. If you can't locate anything using the above suggestions, one possibility is that the files are marked as "invisible". Just to be sure, open "my computer", then select the drive and choose tools - folder options. Click on the view tab and select "Show hidden files and folders". Which OS's and versions, old and new, are you dealing with? Also what software do you use to view and work with the photos?

Normally I use Photoshop 7, but haven't reinstalled it yet. I also use Picassa and Lightroom which are installed, but they can't locate the photos. I've searched according to your instructions, but all i can find are the shortcuts, not the photos themselves.

I've renamed the K drive to G, and searched the hidden folders. No luck.

if you are using PS7 then are they saved as .PSD files and not jpg or tif

just another suggestion

hope you get them back

last week I delivered nine new images to my gallery for a show opening this week, went home ran an action to resave them all as web sized jpegs to send to gallery only to run a cropping action and over wrote all nine, thankfully Norton was able to recover them all, that was a stressfull day as I hadn't backed them up at that stage

Very mysterious...
From "MyComputer" if you right-click the drive and choose properties;
Is the capacity shown consistant with the drive's size? For example, for a 60 GB drive Windows should show the capacity as 55 GB or so. The number will always be less than what the drive is sold as, due to overhead requirements.

Is the used space shown small for what you expect, or remember from the old computer?
Presumably these are Windows systems What flavor of Windows was the old system running? And the new one?
Have you run chkdsk on the drive, or any other house-keeping/diagnostic tool, such as Norton?
Was the old computer functioning correctly the last time the drive was attached to it? Did it crash with the drive attached, or was the drive disconnected without stopping it at any point?
Any problems since attempting to work with it on the new system? (other than files that are apparently missing).
This is a USB drive, presumably?

If the drive is larger than 4 GB, I don't think an OS like Windows ME can access the entire drive as one device. If this is the case, You may have additional partitions, which your current OS is not mounting, for some reason.

It's a USB drive, 150 G. I'm using 40 gig of this, which seems about right from what I can recall from the old system. I never had a problem with the drive, and don't recall ever getting any error messages etc. Old system was XP, new one is Vista. I've got a link to a disk recovery program which I will run later tonight on the external drive to see if there is something there I can retrieve. Before shutting down the old computer, I used the XP backup utlility to save documents and settings from the old system to the external drive. When I set up the new computer, I used the Vista version of the same utility to move the files back from the external drive. There was a lot of churning going on, but noting unusual happened as far as I could tell. Thanks for all the suggestions:)

The world works in mysterious ways. today, all my photos reappeared on the external drive. I'm dumbfounded. It makes no sense, but there they are. Vista bugs??

Vista bugs??

I wouldn't be at all surprised. Probably fixed with one of the zillion msoft "important updates" that seem to be accompanying purchase.

I'm just glad they reappeared for you. I have a new Gateway system
ordered, and it's coming with Vista. I checked my scanner and printer,
and they both have drivers for Vista, so I'm hoping the change
goes smoothly.

How are you feeling about Vista?

susan

How are you feeling about Vista?Working smooth as silk for me.

Bill

Working smooth as silk for me.

Bill

I like smooth as silk :D

It's always easy to find negative comments about new systems, so it makes me very happy to hear you say that, Bill. My old machine was a dinosaur, so this new one is going to be FUN! Yee ha :)

susan

Overall, it works fine. There are a few quirks though, that can drive you nuts. Vista is always asking you to verify certain actions that you take, and you need to give permission for steps that should be automatic. I still can't get my Silverfast software to work with my Epson scanner, and the Silverfast help (non-help) people have no clue. As with XP, I'm sure the quirks will work themselves out with various patches etc. over time.

Vista is always asking you to verify certain actions that you take, and you need to give permission for steps that should be automatic.This doesn't happen for me very often and seems to be no problem at all. Certainly not the problem those Mac commercials allude to! I have noticed some problems running older programs, but compatibility mode seems to work fine. Time to upgrade a few of these old dinos anyway. All in all I think it is a much better OS than XP.

Bill