Okay. I'm using Microsoft Windows XP Professional, v. 5.1. I've had my computer since 2002 and it's been faaaairly reliable. I've had two major issues with it since I got it, the biggest one being last summer when I lost everything on my C drive (luckily for me, I had another hard drive with MOST of my important stuff and it made it out unscathed) because I couldn't turn it off in time during a thunderstorm.

Anyway. Last week, on Wednesday, I was uploading a picture into an existing folder. I noticed that the folder wasn't turning up in the drop-down menu, which was odd. I opened my E drive, opened Documents and My Pictures, and the first thing I noticed was that there were only about 5 sub-folders. This is the drive that was salvaged last summer, and it was installed mainly to save me some space, so I had almost 100 folders from 2004 to 2006. I went back and then re-opened it to find some of them, but not all of them, suddenly showing up.

Every single folder from 2006, plus all the pictures that weren't in folders, were gone. I tried doing the re-opening thing again to see if they suddenly appeared too, but it didn't work. I had definitely not done anything to delete them or touch them at all, and they'd definitely been there since at least the night before.

I opened my Windows Movie Maker, because if a picture in there is deleted or renamed or moved, the link is broken; all the pictures that were in there were part of the missing bunch, and none of their links were broken. I called a friend who usually helps me, and he told me to enter the location link from one of those pictures in IE's address bar, and lo and behold, it was like I was in that folder and they were all right there.

I tried with another folder that I remembered the name of and the same thing happened; there were all the pictures. This leads me to believe that none of my pictures are actually missing, renamed, or deleted. There are two issues: the My Pictures folder doesn't seem to realize that they're there (it lists 52 folders, which only accounts for the visible ones, and the size is definitely wrong) and I can't simply type in all their names on IE because I couldn't possibly remember the name of every folder. They all start with a yyyy-mm-dd followed by some random keywords depending on the pictures.

It's driving me crazy because I know that they're there, and I can't see them, and they aren't hidden because my folders are set to show me hidden files. I even tried making a new folder with the name of one of the missing folders and it told me I couldn't because it already exists. THEN SHOW ME IT, you stupid computer .

Please please help me, some of those pictures are of the most important things that have ever happened in my life and this is really just driving me absolutely mad.

have you tried to do a system wide search for the filesHey -- you say you're already viewing hidden files, how about system files? They're hidden from view by default as well, and you can unhide them from the same menu that you unhid the hidden files.

Also, if you know the full path of one of the missing files, you can put that into the explorer bar manually and see if you can access them that way.

Of COURSE, there's no logical explanation as to why these folders would suddenly be marked system, but who KNOWS. Perhaps you UNKNOWINGLY did a SWEEPING change of attributes to a drive?Also:

If the files are indeed where they appear to be, the Command Prompt should be able to find them. If you're interested in trying the CMD method, follow my "Emergency DOS lesson":

1. Start > Run
2. Type CMD and press [Enter]
You will be shown a black window with C:\Documents and Settings\Yourname> in the screen.

3. Type E: and press [Enter].
4. Type cd Documents and Settings\YOURNAME\My Documents\My Pictures and press [Enter], replacing YOURNAME with the account name in question.
5. Type DIR /A and press [Enter]. You will see a list of folders. At the bottom will be LISTED the number of Directories/Folders, and the number of files in that particular folder.

If you see all your folders, great! Use the following command:

XCOPY /S /E *.* "C:\Documents and Settings\YOURNAME\My Pictures"

To copy all the files over to your My Pictures on the main hard drive (the one you're using now), and the quotes are essential. If this doesn't allow you to see all your folders/files, then this didn't help, but didn't hurt either.

Regardless of outcome, close the CMD window.