Saving dvd recorder hard disk videos says error

[xmanhattan]

I have some home videos that I transfered from my video to my home dvd recorder.
At first, I could see the particular video but when I recorded it to a dvd disc, I tested it on my dvd player and found that it wouldn't work.
Thinking that maybe it was a bad dvd-r disc, I tried another and the same thing. Then when I went to play it on the dvd recorder it disappeared.

Does anyone know if the files of hard disks on a home dvd recorder can be saved using say a pc utility?

[filmboss80]

Did you FINALIZE the disc after you recorded it? The DVD recorder may play back an unfinalized disc that had not been ejected, but the disc will not play thereafter on any player.

Check your DVD recorder's owner's manual for instructions on finalizing the disc.

[xmanhattan]

Hello filmboss80,

The LG unit that I have doesn't require that, it simply makes the dvd.

The videos are on the hard disk of the dvd recorder and now that one video has simply dissappeared.

The second time that I tried to play the file when it showed up in the list it displayed a stupidly simple ERROR as a message so there is no way that I can tell what or where the actual error is.

I was able to write correctly another video that I had on it. This is why I think that it must be something like a file error that we might see on a computer.

[orsetto]

The most common reason for DVD-Rs not playing is the finalization issue mentioned by filmboss80. If the videos are still on your recorder hard drive, copy them to a new disc but before ejecting use whatever function menu your recorder has for finalizing the DVD. Finalizing adds a simple menu screen to the DVD and makes it recognizable by ordinary DVD players and computer drives. Every DVD recorder finalizes DVD-R: it is required by the DVD spec, your LG may be doing it automatically depending on the settings you made. (If you have never used DVD-R before, but were using erasable DVD-R/W, that is the most likely problem: RW doesn't need finalizing, but -R does.) If you still have this problem even after finalizing, you have several possibilities. It is very odd that DVDs you just made will not play in the recorder itself after you take them out and put them back in: even if not finalized, the recorder that made a DVD should always be able to play it. If the recorder is more than two years old, could be its burner may simply be worn out and unable to make usable DVDs anymore. It will need to be repaired or replaced. Or, you might have changed brands of blank DVD recently: some media just doesn't burn well in some recorders. Try a completely different brand. If the hard drive itself is showing you ERROR messages on some files, you might have drive corruption or the specific video has problems (too many chapters marks, edits in the wrong place the recorder doesn't like, etc). Try deleting those videos and doing them over. Or, you could try re-formating the hard drive with the recorders "initialize" or "repair" menus (if it has those options).

For the normal user who does not do computer programming for a living, it is utterly impossible to use a DVD recorder hard drive outside of the recorder. Once you remove the drive, the recorder will usually not accept it back without service codes. The hard disk format is a proprietary version of Unix unreadable to PCs. There have been one or two reports here from very advanced, highly skilled members (using extremely expensive [$500US+] disc recovery software), who claim to have salvaged videos from their broken recorder hard drive with a computer. But it takes a very very VERY long time to do: at least a month per one-hour recording. You have to examine the drive sector by sector to reconstruct the video, which is saved as hundreds of tiny 4-5 second files scattered around the drive. Rescuing a full hard drive could easily take years of painstaking tedious work. Unless you find such work amusing, it makes far more sense to get your recorder repaired. Or, buy a new recorder and transfer the videos a second time.

[xmanhattan]

Looks like that video is lost then.

I guess that I will have to wait and see if Norton will come up with a dvd-recorder utility in the future!



Thanks anyway.