Corrupted WMV on a DVD. Can't copy nor play beyond 30 sec

[Chopdoc]

I am studying for my Medical License Boards. One of the resources I have is a set of videos. There are three DVDs with multiple WMVs on them. They work fine except that I need to copy them to a hard drive and one WMV on each DVD seems to be corrupted. When trying to copy I get "Cannot copy file name: Invalid MS-DOS function".

The DVDs would seem to be overburns and the files in question are victims of that. They do run from the DVD, but I need them elsewhere as well (portable device).

I have tried numerous things including ASFTools 3.1, Windows Media Encoder 9 series, STOIK video converter 2, WinAVI Video Converter. I tried various methods to copy, repair, convert, index, etc, but no luck.

I was finally able to get a copy of one of them on my hard drive by first burning to another disk, then copying. But after doing that there is still some corruption making it unviewable after the first 30 seconds. I tried all my softwares again but no luck.

What I have now gets about 30 seconds in and stops. There is more, it is a 1.3Gig 7.5 hour video. The file size is right so it's there I think.

Another interesting fact is that on anything but the original there is no dragging, fast forward, etc available...which indicates it is not indexed but I cannot index it either.

In addition, numerous copy attemts resulted in the first 30 seconds copying, with the truncated file size to match. The only way I got around this and got a full file size was by burning it first, then copying to the hard drive. Then I got the full file size but only the first 30 seconds was viewable and there was no dragging, fast forwarding etc.

So far everything I have done indicates there is a corruption about 30 seconds in and I can't get around it, nor can I just edit off the first 30 seconds.

I need this resource available to me on a portable device in addition to having it backed up. It is simply too valuable to me. These are by far the best lectures available and I need them portable and backed up.

These are straight WMV files. No encryption. No copy protection.

Any ideas?


Tried Linux as per a friend's suggestion. No luck. Same problem. I get:

Error "I/O error while copying "/media/cdr...7.5h.wmv".


I get the same 2.2 meg fragment that will play the first 30 seconds or so.

[dnix71]

Run gspot against the file and see what codecs were used. There is a doom9 thread about that error message. I had problems on a Mac trying to read a svcd because the codecs only existed in Windows. Decoding the file required copying it to the hd in Windows and burning it off to a dvd. Then the mac could play it.

Try isobuster. "Extract user data" from that movie to your desktop.

Since Windows doesn't manage codecs very well, it could also be that the first codec that it comes to that 'claims' to be able to play the file, can't actually play it. You can have too many codecs. Try 'rendering" the file in Gspot to see if it actually plays properly.