Howie

Thanks mate, ill try it at home tonight.... although i think its going to be like looking for needles in a haystack!! LOL

Thanks guys, ill give them a go.... However someone told me that once the files were automatically deleted at the end of the burning process that the area they had occupied was subsequently made available for new files and that because of the volume of work then undertaken the likelyhood is that they have all been overwritten and are therefore gone forever!!... What do you think?

Hello there, ok i need some clarification here! I took a load of pictures of my nipper's school sports day on my digital camera and decided to burn them direct from the camera to a CD so she could subsequently show them to her friends on this and her friends computers. I duly plugged in the camera and dragged and dropped the files to the CD drive icon using windows explorerer. I use Windows XP (Home Edition). The files were duly transfered to the CD in 'shadow format' and i pressed the "write these files to CD" icon. All went well and i noticed that at the end of the burning process when prompted to press the 'finish' button on the Wizard all the shadow files automatically disappeared! Well the CD was a peach and i therefore deleted all the files from the camera. NEXT?.... Yes you guessed it, a few weeks later she lost the CD on the way to school!! So i have tried to find the files that were created on the computer during the burning process because the original camera files have gone and I have discovered that they were temorarily stored in a file called "CD burning". This folder is however empty. During the interim period I have burned 3 or 4 further CDs with lots of data for my wife's MSc studies using the same technique and the computer has been re-booted many times since the original sports day copying. Also i have used the camera pretty extensively for other family pics. My question is this?.... Do i have a hope in [bleep] of retrieving/rescueing/restoring these files? I would be prepared to pay for a specialist company to do some sort of professional retrieval as my daughter is now very sad. Thank you in anticipation....

Thank you... ah well i'll wait till next years sports day and have learned my lesson....

Roger that, additionally my daughter and wife spend ages on the internet, my wife for her research and the daughter Neopets!! would that affect the chance of ever getting these pics back? What are paging/swap files? i have no idea!? Is it worth asking a comercial file retrieval company to analyze the hard disk to see if they can find them and how much does such a thing cost? Thanks for the help mate....

Sadly , yes i have! Is it true that Windows writes the copying files to exactly the same place on the hard disk (ie in this case 'CD Burning') every time. and they are continually overwritten each time you use the copying facility?

Hi there, Ok this is the sorry tale! I took a load of pictures of my nipper's school sports day on my digital camera and decided to burn them direct from the camera to a CD so she could subsequently show them to her friends on this and her friends computers. I duly plugged in the camera and dragged and dropped the files to the CD drive icon using windows explorerer. The files were duly transfered to the CD in 'shadow format' and i pressed the "write these files to CD" icon. All went well and i noticed that at the end of the burning process when prompted to press the 'finish' button on the Wizard all the shadow files automatically disappeared! Well the CD was a peach and i therefore deleted all the files from the camera. NEXT?.... Yes you guessed it, a few weeks later she lost the CD on the way to school!! So i have tried to find the files that were created on the computer during the burning process because the original camera files have gone and have discovered that they were temorarily stored in a file called "CD burning". This folder is however empty. Sadly, I have also subsequently burned 3 or 4 further CDs with lots of data for my wife's MSc studies using the same technique and the computer has been re-booted many times since the original sports day copying. My question is this?.... Do i have a hope in [bleep] of retrieving/rescueing/restoring these files? I would be prepared to pay for a specialist company to do some sort of professional retrieval as my daughter is now very sad. Thank you in anticipation....