Q:I cannot access my e-mail account through Yahoo any longer. I opened this account about 10 years ago. I have used it without any problems. About a week ago, I could no longer log in. Yahoo Customer Care has been unable to resolve the problem. One thing they need is my birth date, which for some reason is not matching with what is in their database.
A. It’s six years into the 21st century, and we are still bit by the Y2K bug.
The computer industry was up in arms in the 1990s because two generations of computer programmers had used only two digits for years in dates. So a huge effort went into fixing the planet’s software to end the confusion over whether somebody meant 2020 or 1920 in a computer record. Part of the fix became a rule that all years henceforth will have the four digits they deserve.
In your case, however, the fix went backward. Ten years ago, you were asked for the last two digits only. So go back and enter your birth date as two digits and you’ll be back on that pioneering Yahoo e-mail account.
Q. I need to recover a large number of photographs that I moved from my digital camera onto a CD-R. On nine separate occasions since March, I successfully transferred about 6 megabytes of digital photos from a CompactFlash card onto the same CD-R using Roxio Easy CD Creator software.
This was a total of about 54 MB out of the available 650 to 700 MB of space on the CD-R. On the 10th transfer, only the last 6 MB of photos appear on the CD-R.
I believed, using a CD-R, that one could not erase or lose what had been recorded. What may have happened? Have the first nine sets of photos been lost? Is there a way to search the CD-R for the nine sets of photos thought stored on the CD-R?
A. Chaos over losing data previously recorded when new data is saved has vexed users of CDs and now DVDs ever since the first disc was burned in the early 1990s.
In essence, the software that reads and writes information onto CDs and DVDs must create what are called pointers, which are maps of the disc’s surface showing where files are recorded.
All too often, computer users don’t notice the obscure warnings that writing new data to a disc will create new pointers, which can make the earlier stuff invisible.
There is a tool called Retrieve in the latest versions of Roxio Easy Media Creator you are using that will help. It is found under the Data subheading in the Roxio software listed when one clicks Start and then All Programs.
There’s also an easily acquired program called ISO-Buster that can do the trick, no matter which company’s burning software was used. It’s available at isobuster.com.
