Discs that can't be read

[nathanaa]

I've got a bunch of Maxell DVD-Rs, the yellow ones, with some old TV shows recorded on them. I'm not sure on the media code, as they cannot be read by either of my DVD drives, the regular one or the DVD burner.

They play fine in the standalone players I have. I tried to copy the discs onto TY media, but Nero doesn't see them as being in the drive. I've tried DVDDecrypter and DVDShrink, thinking I could rip them to the HDD and then burn them, but DVDDecrypter also can't see the disc in the drive.

DVDShrink did, at least to begin with. When it tried to read the disc though, it got to 4% and stopped, and after about a minute I got a message that read

"DVDShrink has encountered an error and cannot continue. Data error (cyclic redundancy check)."

I have no idea what is going on - anyone here encountered this before or have any advice / tips for me?

[thecoalman]

"DVDShrink has encountered an error and cannot continue. Data error (cyclic redundancy check)."

Indicates corrupt data. Have you tried it in a different computer?

[Safesurfer]

Might want to give ISOBuster a try too.

[nathanaa]

I hadn't thought about ISOBuster. I loaded it up and gave it a try, but I'm not sure if I am using it properly.

I started ISOBuster, then loaded the first of my problem discs into the internal DVD drive. It wouldn't even show that the disc was in teh drive.

I switched the disc to my external burner, and it was able to read it, and it loaded into ISOBuster.

I haven't used ISOBuster before, and there weren't any guides on just ripping tracks from DVDs, but I kind of had an idea of what to do. I opened the file that had the VOB files in it, right clicked on that file and selected "Extract to" and pointed it at a temp file on my laptop HDD.

After a few seconds of running I got this message -

"Unreadable sector. Sector 24256 couln't be read. Error: 03/03/00. RETRY, IGNORE this sector, or QUIT."

I tried the Retry option, but I just keep getting the same message. Are there alternative settings I need to employ here, or ????

Any help is greatly appreciated folks, thanks.

[thecoalman]

Any smudges scratches on the discs?

[nathanaa]

No. And this is happening on all 6 of the discs of this type that I have.

[thecoalman]

Same spot everytime?

[nathanaa]

Ok, I used ISOBuster again, and right clicked on "Track 1", and chose Extract File. I was hoping it would extract the whole disc instead of just a particular file.

Another error message came up, something about that same bad sector, but it gave me the option to "replace with all zero's" or "replace with dummy data". I selected to replace with dummy data for all, and then it seemed to work. The process just ended, and I got this message -

"Error(s) occurred during Reading.
Number of Errors: 368
Last Error Address: 2290239
Last Error: 03/02/00
Do you want to delete this file?"

I'm at a loss here - will this even run properly with all those errors? Should I have chosen to "replace with all zeros" instead of dummy data? Anyone know what might be wrong with these discs?

[nathanaa]

Oh, and yes, it appears to be the same spot that it first stalls at, at least on the first disc of 6. I've been playing with this one, haven't run the other 5 though to see if I get the same error at the same spot yet.

[nathanaa]

bump

Still need help/advice with this, I'm stumped. ISOBuster doesn't seem to work. Does anyone know of a guide for ISOBuster for straight DVD recovery? All the guides seem to be for VCD/etc. to DVD.

[Safesurfer]

Here's what I get when looking at a DVD in Isobuster. Do you see something like this?

If you right click on the item labeled ISO..., you should see something like my screenshot. Clicking on Extract should extract all of the files on the DVD in the Video_TS directory.

You might also want to run the "Check if all files are physically readable" option shown in the menu.

I've only used Isobuster a couple of times, so I'm no expert, but if you see what I see it's very simple.

[nathanaa]

Well, thanks for the mini-guide, it helped. I follwed your instructions, and there are quite a few problems according to ISOBuster. Lots of unreadable sectors that "would be difficult to recover" and I think it even said "probably will not be able to recover" or something to the effect.

Thanks all, looks like it was a bad burn process that is the root problem.

[Safesurfer]

There's another program I've seen mention of that might be worth trying called CDRoller.

http://www.cdroller.com/

Haven't used it, so I have no idea how good it is. There is a trial version you can download.