recovery from a damaged DVD

[petergr]

I have a DVD (home copy no protection) which is damaged. It has 6 episodes of a TV show on it. Ep's 1 - 3 play fine.
Ep. 4 plays 2/3 of the way then stops - according to DVD decrypter it has a damaged .bup file. Ep's 5 and 6 are worse - they dont play at all, and DVD decrypter reports damaged .bup files and damaged .ifo files.

My questions are:

1. Could the .vob files still contain footage that can be recovered in some way. If so what program and how do you proceed? I have tried DVD rebuilder and smart ripper but either they dont do what I expect or I am using it incorrectly. As far as I can see using Ifoedit the ifo and bup files are just some sort of indexes, so there should be some method of recreating them.

2. I have tried using toothpaste to recover from the scratches wiping from the centre out. So far to no avail. How long do you need to work at this method? And how successful are the commercial kits (relative to the toothpaste method)

I have manually copied the files into Nero and made a new copy but it is no different.

Thanks

Peter G

[Shadowmistress]

Try ISOBuster to copy direct to your hardrive and then try extracting from that. It's worked well for me in the past.

Other than that, any software which claims recovery of information from damaged disks.

[redwudz]

As far as polishing, the machines work well for lots of small surface scratches, but not as well for 'gouges'. For that, manual labor works best. You can polish in small circles, just not parallel to the tracks too much. It took me an hour of careful polishing when I found a giant scratch on my week old XP disc. But it worked.

With toothpaste, you need one with a mild abrasive, like a 'tartar control' type. White seems to be more popular. Hmm....., I wonder how an electric toothbrush and a Q-tip installed instead of the brush would work?

Be aware you are removing some of the surface, so you can go too far. Some people report good luck with 'Brasso', a metal polish available in many stores. You might also try some furniture polish to temporarily fill in the grooves. Different DVD drives can sometimes read better than others in these circumstances.

If this all fails, ISOBuster is a recovery program that has worked for me. Others may suggest a better program. Usually with a badly scratched disc, you will end up with gaps and may have to do some editing to clean it up.

[petergr]

Sorry to take so long to get back. Thanks for the suggestions - I followed them all to no avail. I think these files are beyond recovery!. Thanks for your help.

Peter G

[b1tchm4gn3t]

I have a program that has worked for me everytime with scratched disks called DVD Data Rescue, its pay though

[MackemX]

when you say it's damaged is it scratched? If it isn't then have a look at the DVD and see if it's all one colour and that it hasn't got areas of different shades or imperfections in the dye

you don't need the IFO files as you can create a DVD from the VOB files. The BUP is just a backup of the IFO anyway. When you try ripping with DVDDecrypter have you tried selecting only the VOB files in file mode? Change the settings so that it doesn't retry that much and just fills in dummy sectors for those it cannot read. It may just be a few corrupt sectors

seeing as it's a home copy have you not tried just copying the VOB's using Windows Explorer and normal copy n paste?