Vista - URGENT! Problem opening pictures...please help.

I am praying to the computer gods that someone on here has a solution to my problem. I use Windows Vista Home Premium edition.
I was running out of space on my Dell XPS 1710 Laptop and transferred all my photos and videos to an external hard drive. I plugged the hard drive back into my laptop and now I can't view any of my photos or videos. They are still there, taking up many, many GB's. And on a few of the pictures, I can see them on the thumbnail. However, when I go to open them a message pops up on Windows Photo Gallery saying, "Photo Gallery can't open this photo or video because it might have been deleted or is in a location that is not available."
I know I messed up bigtime by not backing them up. Is there any way to save my files or am I out of luck. Any follow up questions you got, send them my way. Appreciate the help. Thanks.

"Scouts88" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:a5e2168c781ad6b00c6f3e180b3b2739@xxxxxx-gateway.com...

You're in the wrong newsgroup.

This one, as its name suggests, is for Microsoft's Virtual PC software...


--
Mark Rae
ASP.NET MVP
http://www.markrae.net

"Scouts88" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:a5e2168c781ad6b00c6f3e180b3b2739@xxxxxx-gateway.com...Everything is all right. You can still view/edit/print your pictures by
just going to the drive letter that has the external drive and finding them
there. Don't worry about Photo Gallery being confused.

I get the same message all the time. When I import pictures from a camera,
they always get put into a folder that just has today's date. When I then
rename that folder to something meaningful (like "Christmas 2008", for
example) Photo Gallery complains that it can no longer find them. Well
duh.

I never use Photo Gallery anyway.