ok, first my reasons for all the n/a's.. it is the external "data" drive. but my pc's are xp pro. i have a folder full of "KAREOKE" which is the collection of 266 cd's of the catalogue. for some reason, even tho the folders show the collection with the tracks and cdg's. when played.... they show instead a "piece" of a movie. now these cdg's all worked ok because they were used for gigs. but somehow suddenly they now represent a piece of a movie. to try and explain... say sunfly 200, instead of being tracks 1 to 20 as the cd shows (and displays in windows) They actually play a piece of a film. and each track is a different portion of this movie. now i can explain this much...... before these cd's were backed up onto this drive, there were movies that got deleted. also these "clips" span over about 30 or so cd's. as tho they replaced the cd's i saved with 3-4mb clips of the movie for each track of you get me. track 1 shows 30 seconds of "this movie" track 2 shows "the next 30 seconds" of same movie. and so on spanning however many cd's i saved. now to be honest, i am fixing the problem by re-backing up my cd's to "overwrite" the messed up files. but i am kinda curious.... how could windows or even the drive mess up my backup like that, because in the middle of a gig, i would looka lil stupid to put a clients song on screen to only play a movie portion, and that span over so many cd's lol any thoughts to avoid a future problem? thanks for reading.

With all due respect I have to say your post is difficult to read & grasp. Try reorganize your composition. i_Xp/VistaUser

Yup, what XpUser said.

What file player are you using?

Only thing I can think of is the file associations were somehow changed. Check the file associations in the file association function.

Before backing up on the same drive again I would suggest a zero fill format of the drive. You do know that when you "delete" old files the data is not actually erased from the drive. The clusters on which the data is stored are simply labeled as available for re-use. Somehow that old data has been resurrected and is being read instead of your music file data. Both the "new" and "Old" data exists on the disk segment. Whether the problem is related to corruption of the file system or a physical problem with the disk is uncertain but If it were mine I would not like to rely on it. Obtain a diagnostic program from the drive maker and run some tests on the disk. Maybe also get and run Killdisk on it several times to ensure the old data is completely overwritten with zeros. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.