Ripping apparently unfinalized disc?

[wetcamelfood]

Hi, hope someone here can help:

In 2005 I started making DVD+R's with Windows XP using Decrypter & ULead DMF3 and even though when burning it said "finalizing" when it was finishing up, it was kind of a crap shoot, some discs would boot up the menu I made (just the default one that came with DMF3) on my set top DVD player that's hooked to my TV and some wouldn't (though I could press play and it would then go to the menu then I could tell it to start the movie and it would rightly go back to the menu once the movie was done being played) and I understand burner drives back then didn't do the bitsetting thing which I guess is now universal with buring drives.

Anyways, I've since bought a new DVD player for my TV and a disc I made in '05 won't boot up in my new set top DVD player.

So I tried to re-rip the DVD+R disc I made in '05 so I could reburn (using various rippers then trying the copy & paste route in Explorer/file manager/whatever in Windows 7) but it won't recognize the disc.

How else can I extract the files from the disc? I thought about a data disc but since I can't even get my newer PC drives (since the tower I had with XP had since also died and I bought a new one with W7) to recognize the disc. I hope that doesn't mean I've now lost it as it has material I can't just go and get again. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for the replies.

[Baldrick]

Isobuster pro or cdroller.

[jman98]

Try ISOBuster or ISOPuzzle. Unfortunately you'll probably be unable to do anything but just determine if they can even seen anything on the disc without buying a copy of those programs, but that might be enough. The disc could simply be bad if you used low quality media at the time you made it.

[orsetto]

Isobuster pro or cdroller or ISOpuzzler are the usual salvage tools, but as others have mentioned the "free trial" versions don't do jack: you have to pay for them to unlock their capabilities, and they aren't cheap if all you need to do is rescue the one disc.

Try installing a more current Win7-compatible version of ULead DMF3 on your new PC, or at least try the old one if you still have it. If the problem is the disc wasn't correctly finalized by ULead, ULead itself might still be able to read it, play it or perhaps even finalize.

Try downloading the free Handbrake application. Handbrake is used to convert DVD files into other formats like MP4 or M4V for iPod and iPad. It might be able to detect the disc in your drive and find a VIDEO_TS folder to convert even if Windows itself fails to acknowledge the disc. If Handbrake "sees" the DVD, just tell it to make an MP4 file out of it. This may take a couple hours but at the end you'll have an MP4 that you can play on your PC or reconvert later to a DVD with free tools like DVDflick.

Try downloading the free 30-day trial versions of CloneDVD2 and AnyDVD from the SlySoft website. This software duo can sometimes detect damaged or unstable DVDs and repair the file structure during a "cloning."

Did this disc play OK last time you tried it on your previous DVD player? If so, you may need to track down another of the same player and use it to play the disc into a DVD recorder or PC capture. Is your new "DVD player" actually a BluRay/DVD player? BluRay players are allergic to many different DVDs that worked fine on the old DVD-only players. Consider buying a Philips DVD player from a store like WalMart that offers a no-questions-asked return policy. Philips DVD players are known to succeed playing discs that won't work in any other hardware, its worth a shot.