Reading legacy CDs in Vista

[John E]

My brother in law uses a Dell PC with 'Sonic' CD writing software (I guess
it is Sonic RecordNow!). He has a big collection of CDs containing photos
(of industrial hardware - his hobby), and he has recently passed two of his
CDs containing holiday and wedding photos to me.

I am running Vista (x64) with two DVD drives, one a Sony and one an LG
'Super Multi' and when I try to read his CDs I see part of the folder
structure, but some folders are missing, and sometimes all files within a
folder are missing. My wife is still using XP (32bit) with an older Sony DVD
drive, and she can see all the folders and files. A friend who lives abroad
had exactly the same problem as me, unable to see the folders that I could
also not see. I don't know what OS or drives this friend has, however.

Could this be a Vista issue? It seems unlikely that both of my DVD drives
would have the same problem - they both have upgraded firmware, and work
fine with my own old disks (not that I've checked all of them). My friend is
concerned that his huge collection of pictures will be useless if/when he
upgrades in the future. Maybe it's a 'Sonic' authoring issue. I don't think
he was using any packet-writing software on his disks and he says he
finalised both disks.

Suggestions gratefully received.

John.

 

[Jim]

My brother in law uses a Dell PC with 'Sonic' CD writing software (I guess
it is Sonic RecordNow!). He has a big collection of CDs containing photos
(of industrial hardware - his hobby), and he has recently passed two of
his CDs containing holiday and wedding photos to me.

I am running Vista (x64) with two DVD drives, one a Sony and one an LG
'Super Multi' and when I try to read his CDs I see part of the folder
structure, but some folders are missing, and sometimes all files within a
folder are missing. My wife is still using XP (32bit) with an older Sony
DVD drive, and she can see all the folders and files. A friend who lives
abroad had exactly the same problem as me, unable to see the folders that
I could also not see. I don't know what OS or drives this friend has,
however.

Could this be a Vista issue? It seems unlikely that both of my DVD drives
would have the same problem - they both have upgraded firmware, and work
fine with my own old disks (not that I've checked all of them). My friend
is concerned that his huge collection of pictures will be useless if/when
he upgrades in the future. Maybe it's a 'Sonic' authoring issue. I don't
think he was using any packet-writing software on his disks and he says he
finalised both disks.

Suggestions gratefully received.

John.

It is much more likely that his problem lies in the CDs. Some go bad
(unreadable) very quickly. Others last some time longer.

And, some drives are more tolerant of disk errors that others.

For example, I scanned quite a few of my slides and negatives. I saved the
images to CDs in Win98 with Easy CD Creator; when I finished I had 35 CDs.

After getting an XP machine with a DVD writer, I decided to move all the
images from the old CDs to the new DVDs. Alas, quite a few were only
partially readable, and some were completely unreadable.

The questionable ones were all more than 2 years old which is not what I can
archival. I would note that not one of these disks had the gold coating.

The DVDs seem OK, but I would only use disks with the gold coating for
archival use. I use disks from MAM-A.

Jim

 

[Mr. Arnold]

My brother in law uses a Dell PC with 'Sonic' CD writing software (I guess
it is Sonic RecordNow!). He has a big collection of CDs containing photos
(of industrial hardware - his hobby), and he has recently passed two of
his CDs containing holiday and wedding photos to me.

I am running Vista (x64) with two DVD drives, one a Sony and one an LG
'Super Multi' and when I try to read his CDs I see part of the folder
structure, but some folders are missing, and sometimes all files within a
folder are missing. My wife is still using XP (32bit) with an older Sony
DVD drive, and she can see all the folders and files. A friend who lives
abroad had exactly the same problem as me, unable to see the folders that
I could also not see. I don't know what OS or drives this friend has,
however.

Could this be a Vista issue? It seems unlikely that both of my DVD drives
would have the same problem - they both have upgraded firmware, and work
fine with my own old disks (not that I've checked all of them). My friend
is concerned that his huge collection of pictures will be useless if/when
he upgrades in the future. Maybe it's a 'Sonic' authoring issue. I don't
think he was using any packet-writing software on his disks and he says he
finalised both disks.

Suggestions gratefully received.

You can also do this as well to get at old legacy solutions.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx

 

[John E]

It is much more likely that his problem lies in the CDs. Some go bad
(unreadable) very quickly. Others last some time longer.

And, some drives are more tolerant of disk errors that others.

For example, I scanned quite a few of my slides and negatives. I saved
the images to CDs in Win98 with Easy CD Creator; when I finished I had 35
CDs.

After getting an XP machine with a DVD writer, I decided to move all the
images from the old CDs to the new DVDs. Alas, quite a few were only
partially readable, and some were completely unreadable.

The questionable ones were all more than 2 years old which is not what I
can archival. I would note that not one of these disks had the gold
coating.

The DVDs seem OK, but I would only use disks with the gold coating for
archival use. I use disks from MAM-A.

Jim

Thanks Jim.

I don't think it is the disks, on this occasion, because he sent them to me
within a day of burning them, and in any case my friend in Mexico had
exactly the same problem. I think it is probably something to do with either
the burning software (Sonic) or with Vista. (These disks worked with XP)

John.

 

[John E]

You can also do this as well to get at old legacy solutions.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx

Hi Mr Arnold,

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. However, I am more concerned about
the fact that this guy might end up with a lot of 'perfectly burned' disks
which he can't use in the future - under Vista. Nobody yet has suggested
that there might be an issue with Vista in reading disks burned under XP. I
wonder if there is an issue here.

John.