Have I lost my photos forever? URGENT HELP NEEDED!!

Question

Here's the situation. I have a G5 PowerMac, and I recently uploaded photos from my camera. I wanted to burn them to a CD so I took the original picture folders from the harddrive (my bad) and dragged them onto a blank CD. Once I had them on there, I dragged one folder off again to organize them better and got the following error message:
"The alias "21" could not be opened because the original item cannot be found."
Of course I deleted the **** things off my camera already. It gives me the option to:
a) Delete Alias
b) Fix Alias
c) OK
Fixing the alias launches a new browse window that wants me to locate the original file, which would be fine except the file that I put on the CD WAS the original file. It won't let me choose the same file.
I can still see the thumbnails in iPhoto, but I can't do anything to them, can't drag and drop, can't open them in Photoshop, can't even preview them. I spent a good 1/2 hour on the phone on hold with Apple only to be transferred 3 times and then told it would cost a MINIMUM of $60 to troubleshoot this issue, no resolution guaranteed.
Please, please, please someone tell me if there is some way to restore these photos!!

Answer 1

I find the whole burn folder deal and alias thing a little confusing. I remember the first time I went to burn my iPhoto Library folder. After I burned the folder, I was afraid to delete the iPhoto Library folder that was in the burn folder. For days I just kept it there, afraid that if I deleted it, I would delete my iPhoto Library folder that was in my Pictures folder. I ended up making a copy of the iPhoto Library folder in my Pictures folder just in case. Then I deleted the iPhoto Library folder in the burn folder. I checked my Pictures folder and the Library was still there, so I then deleted the copy I made.
anyway, here is an Apple kb on the burn folder
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302276