British Isles Vital Records CD set from the LDS - loading the whole lot onto computer?

Question

I have just purchased this set of 16 CDs - supposed to have 10 million records - although I haven't found anyone from my tree on it yet :-)

It also comes with a Resource File Viewer - which is a program to read the discs.

Because there are 16 discs it makes me very impatient when I have to keep changing discs to look for names starting with a different letter.

Is it feasible to load all the discs onto the computer so that I don't have to have the Cd in to look at the records?

BTW these are the discs in case anybody is interested.

http://www.ldscatalog.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10151&storeId=10151&productId=42351&langId=-1&cg1=13701&cg2=13703&cg3=&cg4=&cg5=&sortId=3&sortOr=1&retURLtext=Back%20to%20

Answer 1

I tried that, but couldnt get it to work.

It appears that the Resource File Viewer is set to read from the CD drive and not the hard drive, and there doesn`t seem to be any way of changing that.

I could be wrong though.

Answer 2

IF you have some understanding of directories and file structures, you may be able to learn which files actually contain the data.  You can then attempt to see if you can 'open' the files from your main system, using something else.  Be sure to check out the file extensions, which may give you clues.

If you find you are comfortable with opening the files with alternate programs.. then you can copy the data files to its own directory on your hard drive.  Be careful to copy and NOT move.. you don't want to lose the integrity of the originals.