ALL PICTURES LOST IN PSE12 AFTER CLONING TO NEW DISK

[GunstonBootlatch]

My original C: drive was having problems and I ckloned to a new drive.  When I opened PSE12 NO PICTURES!!  35,000+ photos and hours of tagging GONE!!  I have an old backup of the PSE12 catalog with copies of the pictures and .xml files, but it/they will not restore.  Should I reinstall PSE12 and see what happens?  Any other suggestions?

HELP please

[Greg_S.]

Do you have both the new and the old drive on the same computer?  If so, I suspect that the problem is the cloning.  What ends up happening is that the photos on the cloned drive are not recognized by Elements.  Elements associates the files with the Disk ID (not the drive letter).  If your cloned disk has the same Disk ID,  Elements will not recognize both disks.  See this article for more details about the problem (and a solution).

I am going to ping @MichelBParis.  He knows more about this problem than I do and I am sure he will have a more complete and better answer for you.

[GunstonBootlatch]

No.  The original drive has been reformatted and is now a standby drive for storage.  Seems like I will have to start over.  UGH!!

[GunstonBootlatch]

Maybe Adobe can comp me a new version of PSE to help ease my angst of having to start from scratch.  I originally started with PSE6 and have previously purchased 6,8,9 and 12.

 

[MichelBParis]

Do you have both the new and the old drive on the same computer?  If so, I suspect that the problem is the cloning.  What ends up happening is that the photos on the cloned drive are not recognized by Elements.  Elements associates the files with the Disk ID (not the drive letter).  If your cloned disk has the same Disk ID,  Elements will not recognize both disks.  See this article for more details about the problem (and a solution).

I am going to ping @MichelBParis.  He knows more about this problem than I do and I am sure he will have a more complete and better answer for you.

By @Greg_S.

Greg,

Many thanks for your link which I have bookmarked.

The danger of cloning to replace a conventional drive with a small SSD is a similar issue of signature collision.

This had been explained by John R Ellis in his psedbtool help doc:

https://johnrellis.com/psedbtool/

Here is the important extract :

Change a Drive’s Volume Serial Number

PSE uses the volume serial number as the primary mechanism for identifying drives, and only if it can’t find a drive with the desired number will it use drive letters.  If you have two drives with the same number, or if try to assign a new drive letter to a drive that used to be a C drive, it may be necessary to change the volume serial number of a drive.   Here’s how to do that:

1.       Download the “volumeid.exe” utility from Microsoft and place it in c:\windows\system32.
2.       Start a command prompt.  In Vista, run the command prompt as administrator by doing Start > All Programs > Accessories, right-clicking Command Prompt, and selecting Run As Administrator.  On XP, run the command prompt from an account that is a member of Administrators (note that this won’t work on Vista). 
3.       Type the following command:

volumeid letter: xxxx-xxxx

where letter is the drive you want to change, and xxxx-xxxx is the new serial number. You can pick any serial number that’s not used by any of your drives.

4.       Reboot.
5.       Verify that the drive has the new serial number by typing this command at the command prompt:

vol letter:

[Greg_S.]

Do not despair yet.  You really haven't told us the details of what you have done, so we have to guess at what might be wrong.  Have you done anything to your computer other than clone the drive and replace the old one with the new one?  For example, did you reinstall Elements?  If so, a new catalog will have been created.  If the old catalog was cloned from the old drive, it will still be available to open. 

What were the problems with the old drive that forced you to get a new one?

When you say you opened PSE 12, did you just have a blank catalog or are there any thumbnails of missing files?

What were the problems with the restoration of the old catalog?

[GunstonBootlatch]

OLD drive was noisy, and I suspected impending failure.  Cloned to newer drive and reformatted and repartitioned to use as backup storage for non-essential files  Because of this issue I decided to upgrade my 2014 desktop and have new hardware coming to rebuild the system with up-to-date components compatible for Windows 11

I have not reinstalled PSE12.  I was thinking of upgrading to the latest, but have held off pending my system upgrade.

When I currently open PSE the scree shows thumbnails of several .avi files, two .pse collages I made and grey rectangle with daisies.  No .jpg thumbnails

On the left side of the screen Local Folders and My Folders are displayed.  When I select a folder to view I get the message “No media to be displayed.”

Selecting menu item Restore Catalog and selecting my backup from 2015 ( right after I finished MAJOR editing and tagging) at  F:\PSE12 Catalog Backup\Backup.tly displays the following message:

“You have selected Original Location as your restore location.  With this option, restoring to a computer which is different from the one you had backed up might create some changes to you existing file structure.  …

I select  “Yes” to continue and I get “File Already Exists”  and I elect to overwrite it; and get the Error “  The catalog was busy and the requested change could not be completed.”

Selected OK and screen returned to .avi’s and grey rectangles.

No luck in displaying my PSE12 photos.

[Greg_S.]

Thanks for the added information.  You may have photos hidden from view.  Try pressing Ctrl+1. This will toggle the view of photos back on.  If that doesn't work, please give us a screenshot of your Elements window showing the rectangle with daisies.

[GunstonBootlatch]

VOILA!!!     Thanks  Ctrl+1 shows my picture,, Great!!

Good News:   I can seen my pictures.  I can select "Local Albums and see my 'albumss' created by setting tags 

Other:   I cannot see the "tagging" info on the right side of the screen,  Unable to assign 'tags' to photos as far as I can figure out.

.

[Greg_S.]

Other:   I cannot see the "tagging" info on the right side of the screen,  Unable to assign 'tags' to photos as far as I can figure out.

.

You need to click the Tags tab at the top of the right-hand panel.

[GunstonBootlatch]

Did that and a few Tag categories show.  What I meant to relay was the thumbnails no longer have the Tag symbol in the lower right corner.  Also I am unable to select thumbnails and drag to a Tag name of vice versa.

Also I note you have an 'Imported Keyword Tags'.   Mine is no longer populated.

In my 2015 Backup I have a folder name “My Catalog”.  In it I have the following files:

catalog.pse12db  99,566KB, and thumb.5.cache  36,249KB that were accessed when I tried to restore my catalog yesterday.

Also I have a folder named CAXMPFiles, 34.3MB with 5,102 .xml files   There is another BreezeData folder 33.8MB and 29,940 breeze-#####.xml files.   The BreezeData folder was accessed yesterday during the attempted restore.   Are these my missing Keyword’s?

Is it maybe time to try a PSE12 reinstall?