I backed up my hard drive to DVD using Roxio Backup from Easy Media Creator 8 in anticipation of moving to Windows Vista. Approximately 60 GIG of software and data.

Once I was on Vista, I went to retrieve the data and got a number of errors saying that Retrieve had failed.

I have now gone to another XP system, but when I put the DVD in, first it asks for the last disk, which I insert. At that point it is not recognizing that this is the last disk and I noticed that it says "Disk 10 of -1 Disk Set" and asks me to put the last disk of the set in again.

If I hit cancel, it reads the catalog on the last disk. If I select the folders and files that I want, it only retrieves the folders and no files. I then noticed that the specific files that I want are on Disk 7, so I put that disk in and go through the same process which results in the same folders being created but no files.

Any Suggestions would be appreciated. I have all of my software and data files on these backup DVDs and cannot retrieve any of it at this point.

EMC 8 doesn't work with Vista.

Spanned discs are usually very disaster prone but what you could do is to try isobuster or cdroller and see if either of those can read the data for you - if they can, then you can buy the program to extract it.

Both are free for evaluation purposes

www.cdroller.com
www.isobuster.com

One final note - EMC8 won't work in Vista

Thanks you both. I actually did purchase EMC9 for Vista, but the Retrieve that runs is already on the DVDs.

I am purchasing cdroller to see if it will retrieve my data. Thanks again for the input.

Seems cdroller only extracts the data - no issues there since I can see the files through explorer and can actually drag them over to my hard drive.

The issue is the compression! From reading other sites, it looks as though I may be in trouble here!

It's a bit late for this, but for next time -

Having been involved with refurbishing old computes, with loads of old Hard Drives at hand - there is no way I would upgrade to a new system unless that new system was on a new Hard Drive. The old one can thereby be kept. (But if you plan to donate it, I'd suggest erasing it FIRST.)

Lynn

Calirado: You have done the double whammy, you used Backup and Compression!

Retrieve is a stand alone exe but your experience indicates it will not work with Vista. This leaves you with trying to Retrieve in XP.

In the few experiments I did with Backup, I found that sometimes you have to be persistent. It took me up to 3 tries to get one backup set to work in Retrieve. (that was enough to turn me off!)

Make sure your Discs are clean and free from fingerprints etc. to give the drive the best chance of reading them. Likewise if they are RW media a Burner will stand the best chance of reading that media. Even so, try them in a ROM drive if you have one.

Can you read the disk(s) at all in the XP system or does the rom drive just "click" and search when you put the disk in?

If you really want your data back:

Put the CD/DVD drive that created the backups in the XP system you referred to.

Get it installed and working. Assign the same drive letter to it that it had when you created the backup.

Make sure the same version of the backup program is installed on the XP system that created the backup (there may have been an update to the software. I believe version 8 had one update if you had a retail boxed purchase of the software).

Retrieve your stuff