PS Organizing. (Long winded post)

Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM

02/19/2007 09:36:53 AM · #1

OK guys here is the situation, this weekend I had a motherboard fail due to a powersupply problem on my desktop I use for photoshop and catologging my photos. I had luckily backed up everything just by chance on friday. So the only thing in question I had was my friday night assignment, which thankfully I had already sent to the editor, and the monster truck show we took my son too on saturday night. I was able to recover the originals from my CF cards and have them safely archived on DVD. So all the originals are saved. I was able to get a new motherboard, PS and the one stick of memory that seems to be effected replaced with new stuff. However when I try to boot to WIndows XP it does some weird stuff and wont boot.

I was able to put the old MB back in and get the system up and running very unstable as it has appears as though windows was corrupted at some point by my trying to get the system back online with so many unfinished loads and power shutting off. I have all of the important stuff saved, and also all my software on CD. My question is, can anyone tell me how to backup the catalog the Elements uses with the proxy photos that will allow me when I fdisk and reload everything to use it as my cataloging. I use Elements to download and organize everything and CS2 to edit and save. I had Elements before getting CS2 so I just kept the cataloging going and allowed it to download. I just want to be able to use it when I reload everything. Anyone know how to save whats in the catalog now so that if I need to pull an original out of the DVD's that I can? Or am I just asking too much? I have to get this done this week as I have nothing to edit photos on until I do and I have 2 assignments end of the week. Thanks

MattO

Sorry to my WPL friends as I was unable to save my shoots for this week from this and hadnt uploaded yet.

splidge

Canon EOS-40D

02/19/2007 10:11:17 AM · #2

Hi,

I have PSE5, so if you had an older version of Elements this might not be accurate.

Anyway, the catalog is by default called "My Catalog.psa" and on my machine is stored at:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Catalogs

So make a backup of that file and you should be good to go, although I'm not sure how well Elements will react to all the photos not being there any more (although if it's really a problem you can just copy them back off DVD I assume).

Hope this is the information you were after.

splidge

Canon RF 24-70mm f/2.8 L IS

02/19/2007 10:48:12 AM · #3

Thanks SPlidge,

I'm not sure I can get to it, the system is very unstable I can get it to come up and load windows, but it does some very odd rebooting on its own and when it comes backup it tells me it couldnt recover from a serious error. So I'm not sure if I can get to that or not. It may be a simple fact that I'm just going to have to start from scratch and reload everything and just be thankful that I have my originals saved. What really puzzles me about this is the Power supply that failed is less then 2 months old and seems to have spiked things. Really frustrating. Oh well. The world of computers.

MattO

kirbic

Canon EOS R5

02/19/2007 11:36:19 AM · #4

Sorry to hear about the hardware issues Matt. FWIW, the one time I had a power supply fail, it was only 4 months old. I can see how a suddenly-failed supply could take out a motherboard. Also, unless your new motherboard is identical to the old one, there will usually be enough differences that Windows' drivers will be messed up, and it won't be able to load.

Canon RF 24-70mm f/2.8 L IS

02/19/2007 11:40:05 AM · #5

Originally posted by kirbic:

That may be an issue, the old SPacewalker shuttle AK31 is an older board, the new one is a Winfast with an AMD 64 processor. SO that may be an issue. Thats why I am trying to find a way to salvage as much as I can before I fdisk 160GB man hard drive and reload everything. The catalog is something when I get a call from an editor or a customer I use to be able to pull an original and work from it. Looks like I may be hosed on that but at least I have been wise enough to backup originals to DVD.

MattO

kirbic

Canon EOS R5

02/19/2007 11:54:29 AM · #6

I'd go get another HDD, load Windows to that, and hook up the old drive as a slave. You should then be able to mount the old drive and extract any data you please. If you have another desktop system, you could temporarily hook up the drive in that system and do the same thing.