Hi folks. Wish you all a happy new year.
I am confronted by quite a nasty problem. Recently, I borrowed 3 old VCDs from my friend who used to play it on a home VCD Player. As we all know VCDs as well as all other movie formats can be played with ease on a PC (provided the necessary codecs are there). However, this one I found to be an exception. The movie was divided into three VCDs and while two of them could be played on my PC I could not play the 3rd one. Windows showed just two .cda audio tracks of 44 bytes each as the contents and no sign of the usual VCD folders. On investigating further using Nero and later with ISOBuster 1.5 I have the following results:
a) The VCD has two tracks and is in the usual CDROM-XA format.
b) The 2nd track is the data track with around 696 MB (799 MB actual) of data.
c) Nero's MultiMounter utility indicated that the 1st track, i.e. the ISO9660 track is corrupted as a result it is being read in as a data track (Mode 2) and as such the folder structure is unavailable under DOS and Windows.
d) The disk when loaded in ISOBuster 1.5 generates an unreadable Primary Volume Descriptor error (Read error address: 16) further establishing point (c) above.
e) The same disk is however played flawlessly on my home VCD Player as the home VCD Player does not need Track 1 for accessing the disk. Also the .dat file is in very good shape as it gave no errors during playback.
f) In order to correct this bad CD I tried to extract the MPEG data using ISOBuster ("Extract mpeg data from M2F2 frames" Option). However the resulting .mpg file is probably not flawless either as when I open the file in VirtualDub it can only parse a small length of the file and then halts parsing telling that the MPEG File ended unexpectedly and the file is damaged or incomplete. Windows Media Player, too, couldn't play the file (error: Class not registered). However, at the same time the .mpg file could be played without any glitch in Cyberlink's VCD PowerPlayer (or, PowerVCD as you may call it). I would like to add that when extracting the 2nd Track in ISOBuster I encountered 15 unreadable sector errors which I had to ignore as there was no other option. However since the CD itself plays so well in a VCD Player these could be minor problems.
I, therefore, request you all folks to suggest me some methods and/or softwares that could easily and flawlessly extract the .dat file in the 2nd track and/or help recover the original file structure of the VCD (or recover VCD Data).