Explain finding missing photos by copying to another disk and back

I would appreciate if someone can explain what is happening to my iPhoto file under Lion.
Here are the sequence of events in my iPhoto library of about 5000 photos and about 44GB of data:
1. I noticed that several photos would not display when I clicked on the thumbnail. I got a black triangle indicating no photo present.
2. I found this to be a random occurence in many events.
3. I copied my iPhoto file to an external disk.
4. Then I used the rebuild database option with all options checked.
5. The resulting database was rebuilt with many problems. The missing files were still missing and most of the thumbnails had a different orientation than the base photo. The base photo was basicly correct and the thumbnal was randomly upside down or right or left.
6. I started correcting the thumbnails and after several hours I decided that I would never get through them and the problems with the original database weren't as bad.
7. So I chucked the rebuilt database into the trash.
8. And then copied the original database back from the eternal disk.
9. Then when I got into iPhoto all my photos were in the correct orientation and!!!!!! all of the missing photos were present again with their thumbnails. There were no problems in the database.
So what happened? WHy did this fix the problem? What I did was a straight finder system copy from one disk to the other and back.

I now have to decide wheter to use this new database or try to fix the old one.
There is no way to fix the old one. That databse file is unstable. It would be unwise to invest further effort in it.
My suggestion would be
a: restore from a known-good back up if you have one
Or
b: Stick with the rebuilt library and try recover the missing 69 pics from the damaged library and import them to the new one.
Regards
TD

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Before you get befuddled here's the easy way. Install one of the three new drives. Prep the drive as follows:
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2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
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Ipod photoes were copied onto another ipod and orginal photos are gone now can i get them back?

okk so i have 2 ipod touches and i wanted both to have the same music and videos so i synced them both to one itunes. but then after i synced them both they were fine after i noticed that the ipos have the same photos. from the device. so now one ipods original photos are gone and only have the photos from the ipod that was synced first. is there any way to get the origional photos back the ones before the sync????

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A bit of background:
I decided to dive in and clean up a big 40K catalog I have. This involved:
Moving images around
Creating new folders
Renaming existing folders
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All of this was done within LR to avoid problems. But now, everything is working fine, LR does not complain that there are missing photos EXCEPT when I try to synchronize a folder.
The strange this is there is no question mark on the images and when I use the Find Missing Photos, LR tells me that there are no missing photos.
But when I try to synchronize a folder (any), it finds all the images as new images and suggests to remove the missing photos (both matching the exact number of images). Obviously I don't want to do that and loose my edits...
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Thanks but this a completely different problem. You are referring to the "Treat JPEG files next to RAW files as separated photos" setting that I have unchecked purposely and I do not shoot RAW + Jpeg anyways.
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Melissa,
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Does that make it clearer, sorry i was not so clear the first time.

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Explain finding missing photos by copying to another disk and back

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