Lost data when upgrading

[Cathy A Stanford]

I've been using gnucash 1.6 for years.  Recently I upgraded to fedora 
core 1 from rh6.2 and got gnucash 1.8.8.  When I loaded my old file lots 
of data seemed to get lost.  For example all of my stocks lost the count 
of shares (though all of the price updates I did with the old perl stock 
quote script are still there).  What happened?  Will I have to reenter 
all the data or start all over or see if I can rebuild the old software 
and give up on using gnucash 1.8.8?

Thanks in advance.