I'm a professional photographer and I've been saving my digital files to CD since 1997. Recently I needed to print some photos from a 1998 CD, but when I put it in my XP computer either nothing happens or I get a corrupt disk error. I put the CD in one of my old Win 2000 computers and can get to the files.

I know that I can copy them to my harddrive and re-burn them, but I have alot of CDs and I'm also worried that as time goes by I could lose all my photographs as operating systems change.

Has anyone run in to this problem? Do you know it there is a fix for XP to solve this problem. I've been searching the web and will continue to do so, if I cannot get any help here.

Thanks

Hi hughck...

Probably the easiest solution would be to copy them to an external hard drive from the 2000 machine. Generally, files on a hard drive don't have this compatability issue and you would be able to access them on the XP machine. You could get them all together and organize them that way, and still have the cd's as an extra backup.

wannabe1

I had a similar experince with XP for a Win '98 burned CD. I was able to read them with GIMP. I was never able to explain it but it was the only reasonable way to access my .jpg, and .gif files. At least without reburning them.
wannabe1's suggeation was excellent. Refusing to the externial drive. I made a "poorman" server with an old P-I 233Mhz computer. I loaded W2k onto it and stripped the CD out and install 4, 120Gb hard drives for backing up and thinning out my dries. It does not even have a keyboard mouse or monitor (KVM switch). P-I 233Mhz with 512Mb RAM, Sharing to the drives turned on. I have a 4x4x8 externial CD just in case. I had the computer, just had to buy the HDs.

If the problem is realy related to WinXp not being able to read the CD's from an older OS (which I find odd), you could also install a Virtual Machine with a w2k OS VM. Then you'll be able to copy any CD you wish.

I tried GIMP, but it did not work. Thanks to all of you for trying to help me.

I know that there is something in XP that is causing the problem, since Win 2000 opens the CDs, but I can't seem to find any fix for this. So I'm going to have to copy them from another computer and store on a hard drive. This makes saving digital photo for the future very iffy. But I guess I'm going to have to live with it.

Unlike our parents and the people before them, were they have boxes of photos and negatives going back a 100 years. I can see our children trying to see our digital pictures 20 years from now and not being able to view them unless there are prints of them. The future is not always better!