Help with unreadable DVDs

[RainDawg]

I've been experiencing some difficulty with my DVD-RW drive lately. For some reason, there are certain data discs that it just simply won't read. Put it in the drive, and it sits there thinking for a while, and then stops and nothing happens. Going in through explorer it responds the same as if there is nothing in the drive, doubleclicking asks you to "instert a disc".

Thing is, all of these I verfied upon burning to know that I had good data on there. So, are my discs bad? It my drive dead? All of these are the same brand (Ritek) and burned with Nero 6.

I've cleaned out the drive with air in a can, and run one of those lens cleaners through it. I'm at a loss, but I really need to get some of these things off of this disc!

[wazoo2u]

Drive might be flaky. CDRoller works real nice for recovering unreadable discs.
http://www.cdroller.com/

[RainDawg]

No dice...Windows doesn't even recognize that there's a disc in the drive, so this softeware won't help. Just upgraded to the latest firmware, and it's still not working.

I have a bad feeling that either my drive or my DVD has failed. Honestly, I'd rather it be the drive, there's some very important data on here.

[U2Lynne]

Do you have a friend's drive you can try the DVD in? A work drive? Take it to a computer store and test it out there.

[Cornelious Jerome Garcia Oppenheimer]

i have had 1 out of 50 dvd discs i archived so far do this same thing. all of the rest worked fine. it verified when burned and when i went to grab a show off of it later it would not read. same exact scenario. my guess was the disc went bad. sucks to lose the shows that way. at least with cdr you only lose 700mb not 4gb.

what shows did you lose? maybe we can rally the troops and get them replaced.

[katnapz]

How soon do you need the files RainDawg? There are certain things you can try...some short cause you can do them on your system...and some long cause you need a different system.
Honestly, some are going to read some of these and think I'm talking voodoo.
-I guess you've tried thee olde "reboot your computer" (if you're on a Windows platform). Amazingly, even my XP system responds to this once in awhile
-Have you tried relocating your DVD drive or opened your case to help it cool off? Had someone who's drive had problems from tower heat once the computer had been on for awhile.
-I've known of those clear plastic "static cling" things helping once in awhile, but that's usually when the disc is scratched-same thing for those disc "buffers"
-Have you tried a different drive (preferably in a different computer)
-Voodoo here-If the files aren't over the 4gig size limit, I've had limited success booting a Win98SE up in Safe Mode and accessing a bad disc
-Voodoo here, I actually had discs (when I was transferring all those CDR's over) that if I popped them back out, turned the disc in the tray a quarter turn, and reinserted would always read...but if I just popped the tray in and out without touching the disc it wouldn't read.
-If you look up "DVD recovery" in Yahoo or Google there are a number of recovery programs....now, I don't think any of them actually allow you to recover anything without paying for the program, but they do let you see if you can even see the disc, which gives you some diagnostics to work with.
-Same discs all the time? Or do you notice it randomly?

I think though, if you can hang out until you can get to someone elses drive to see if it can read the disc that's probably the best thing to do at this point.

BTW, have you ever used the Nero CD-DVD Test in the Toolbox section of Nero? Try the scan disc test on a couple of your discs that are good to see how they're holding up. I use it about once every 25 to 50 discs to get an idea how the "stack" I've bought is. You might be surprised to find discs that you read off of that report a bad sector now and then.

[Rider]

i have had 1 out of 50 dvd discs i archived so far do this same thing. all of the rest worked fine. it verified when burned and when i went to grab a show off of it later it would not read. same exact scenario. my guess was the disc went bad. sucks to lose the shows that way. at least with cdr you only lose 700mb not 4gb.

what shows did you lose? maybe we can rally the troops and get them replaced.


YOu know until about a month ago I never thought about it, then one day I was like "fuck if I have one DVD go bad I can lose like 10 shows". Another thing I noticed, last week I was buring a ton of coasters nero kept failing verification. So finally after about my 10th bad burn, I copy everything on to the hard drive, make an md5 of both the files from the dvd and the files on my hard drive and they both match. I have afeeling there is something very wrong with the way nero nero checks DVDs.

[katnapz]

Doh, stupid me...you can also use Nero CD-DVD Speed to alter the speed of the drive and the access speed. I've never used it on DVD's, but in the old days if I had a CDR that was giving me problems there was a program I'd use to actually keep the drive from spinning faster than, say 1X. It worked wonders at recovering CDR's...but then the CDR's and drives got more reliable and I never bothered with it again. See if slowing down the drive helps.

[RainDawg]

Well, I've tried rebooting, tried taking the disc in and out a few times, tried booting in safe mode. It's always the same disc, just ran about 10 or so of them through the drive, and they all worked, and then came back to the one that won't read and it's still dead.

I have a few rare Waits bootlegs on here, one that was just requested of me in a trade, so I'll be pretty pissed if it's the disc. I have not tried carrying it to a different computer yet, but I don't have any friends in the immediate area with a drive. The only other thing I could do at this point is bring it to a computer store and see if it reads there.

I don't know how Nero checks discs, but it could be that the program just sucks. It wouldn't surprise me.

I'm using a few different data recovery tools, but until my computer can actual recognize that there is a disc with data on it in the drive, they are useless. Even with a ruined disc, it should be able to see that there's something on there, no?

[TheMamba]

Try different discs that you have. I'm sure you've tried this, but figured I'd throw it out there.

If NONE of your discs work, it's probably the drive.

If you're using XP, go to your control panel, and then into System. Hardware tab > Device Manager > then find your DVD player in the list. Right click on the icon and select properties. Thing should say that the device is working properly.

Note that this is the generic Microsoft answer to anything, and I've never seen it "work" or find the exact problem.

Another thing: turn off your computer completely. Unplug. Open the case up and try disconnecting all the drive's cables. If you've never done any hardware work in a computer, make special note of what cable(s) go where and in which direction the cables go in. Plug all the cables back in. Plub PC back in, start her up and see if that works.


Edit: Just saw that you've tried other discs and they worked.......that doesn't look too good for the one....

[katnapz]

Even with a ruined disc, it should be able to see that there's something on there, no?

I don't know for certain, but I think you'd be able to at least see that much. Some recovery programs can just go in and "rip" whatever is on the disc out. I used a program like that once on a bad harddrive. The file structure had gone completely bad and the computer just couldn't find anything. If there are bad sectors scattered across the disc (and assuming you can eventually read the disc), it'll probably be like back when you'd fool Windows 95/98 into defraging a floppy that would go bad. Windows would ask if you wanted it to fix what it could and you'd say yes....afterwards you might be able to pull up that Word document or picture, but there's be errors in some like gobblygook lettering or part of the picture would be corrupted. I'm not sure how that would effect the integrity of your music

There "could" be a different way to work this if things don't work out with a different drive/computer. It's a real pain in the butt because there's a lot of prep work that has to be done (i.e., steep learning curve and I haven't messed with the below for months now), but it depends on how desperate you are. You'd need tow optical drives. I managed to pull info off a completely hosed harddrive once doing it, but I don't know off the top of my head if you can access a DVD drive (think you can...pretty sure you can actually). Try googling BART PE if you're interested. In a nutshell, you'd be setting up an OS that would run off your optical drive (no hard drive is required). It uses different drivers to access your optical drives and it's possible that could allow you to access the disc, but I'll be honest and say now that it's a slim chance. On a side note, once you set the disc up, you can amaze your friends running a computer from a CD/DVD (look ma, no hard drive).

[RainDawg]

Well, I've done data recovery before, even on a disk that had hte file system removed. Of course, your OS needs to be able to see the data before anything can be done to do a blind-read of the bitstream. I've tried 4 different data and defective DVD recovery tools, and none of them even see it as a disc. I put it in the drive, the mouse cursor turns into the little disc thing...it hangs up the computer for a short while (15 seconds, long time), and then goes back to saying the drive is blank. No program has even been able to successfully tell me there's a disc in the drive, much less start trying to read that data.

Interestingly enough, when I reboot the computer, it gets to the part where it tries to boot from a CD, and it just hangs there....until I pop open the DVD tray. As soon as this one disc is not in the drive anymore, it moves on to finishing the bootup. All of my other DVDs work fine.

I'm giving up for tonight...I really hope that I'll be able to at least rescue this disc...I have a few remastered projects on here that represent many hours of work.

shitfuckasscuntsonofabitchpiss

[Ruud]

I had the same problems: burning a DVD and then couldn't read it. Even Windows says that there's no disc in the drive. But then I could read the disc just normal in my wife's (newer) computer.. After I installed more codecs I was able to read the discs myself. Part of the K-Lite Codec Pack is G-Spot. You can use that to see which codec is needed. (You can find it on SourceForge.net)
This worked also when I tried to copy a show from a friends DVD. On my computer the image was very jerky, not moving in a normal flow. On the other computer everything was ok. After I updated my codec, my computer was also ok.
Now our only problem is with DVD-RW discs that are unreadable.

[RainDawg]

Well...the problem has been solved.

I took the disc into Best Buy and put it into one of their computers...it worked fine. I bought the drive, installed it, and all is well. I guess the old drive was just starting to go...

So, now that I am the proud new owner of a dual-layer drive, let's get some DVD-9 torrents going! ;).

[Rider]

Well...the problem has been solved.

I took the disc into Best Buy and put it into one of their computers...it worked fine. I bought the drive, installed it, and all is well. I guess the old drive was just starting to go...

So, now that I am the proud new owner of a dual-layer drive, let's get some DVD-9 torrents going! ;).

How much did it cost you?

Not that it matters much, the media for thos things is still at a cray price. Can't imagine what it would feel like to burn a 5$ coaster I get mad enough when I waste .50 cents.

[diggrd]

Well...the problem has been solved.

I took the disc into Best Buy and put it into one of their computers...it worked fine. I bought the drive, installed it, and all is well. I guess the old drive was just starting to go...

So, now that I am the proud new owner of a dual-layer drive, let's get some DVD-9 torrents going! ;). I'm all for that but the blanks are still too much $$$, can you find them for less than $10. I paid $35 for 3 just to test them but still haven't bothered.

[RainDawg]

I paid $120 for the drive. Didn't buy any DVD-9 blanks though, cause they were $34 for three. I know they are down to $5 or so online, but it's still not practical to use it yet. But, in a year or so when it starts becoming the norm, I'm ready ;).

[wazoo2u]

I paid $120 for the drive. Didn't buy any DVD-9 blanks though, cause they were $34 for three. I know they are down to $5 or so online, but it's still not practical to use it yet. But, in a year or so when it starts becoming the norm, I'm ready ;).
Which drive did you buy ?

[RainDawg]

Sony DRU-710A

[wazoo2u]

Think that was on sale at CompUsa this weekend too. I'd be interested to know how you like it after a while. I'll try to remember to ask you about it..

[RainDawg]

Yeah, it's a Lite-On, which I've always had good experiences with, though never used it for DVDR yet. It seems to be a pretty new model, as there are only a few reviews to be found on the 'net. It read the disc I wanted it to read, perfectly, which was worth about the cost of the things right there....

[tritonman]

Raindawg-

Out of curiousity, how old was your defective drive? I've had a couple problems like the one you spoke of. Usually it works fine, but it acts up every once in a while.

[RainDawg]

The drive is only a year old, but I've burned around 400 DVDs on it. I know that shouldn't kill it....

[tritonman]

The problem is that they don't really give you a life expectancy for them. 400 DVD's is def a lot, but we have nothing to base that number on. I wonder if there's a site that tests the durability and longevity of dvdr's, dvd burners, etc? If not, I'll check that out later tonight.

[fatoldpig]

Haven't had a problem with DVDs yet But sometimes my old (probably about 5 year) Plextor CD writer does not recognize some cd-r's but Pioneer DVD-rw does.

Make sure you make a copy of that DVD.

These days hard drives are getting so cheap I have one copy on hard drive and another copy on DVD. Last Friday Best Buy but had 120 gig HD for $30 after rebate and OfficeMax had 200 gig for $50.

[aaadbell]

Well...the problem has been solved.

I took the disc into Best Buy and put it into one of their computers...it worked fine. I bought the drive, installed it, and all is well. I guess the old drive was just starting to go...


I just skimmed this thread, so maybe somebody said this, but I would bet neither the disc nor the drive were defective. With both CDs & DVDs you will find certain combinations of (1) make of disc, (2) type of drive it was burned on, and (3) type of drive you try to read it on that cause problems. (Probably should add (4) condition of the disc at the time you put it in the drive. I even wonder if it makes a difference whether it's still cold from the mailbox when you put it in a drive.)

On my previous computer, I usually had trouble extracting Mitsui CDRs, even though they worked fine in other CD drives. I have 2 DVD drives in my current computer and 1 more at work (only one is a writer), and I've had to use all 3 to extract the information off of some data DVDs. I've had DVDs that I couldn't extract and I'd send them on to somebody who said there was no problem, and vice versa. I have also had Rain Dawg's experience of the computer not even recognizing that there's a disc in the drive, where another drive will recognize it.

It's very sad that the companies who make the media and the drives cannot make them completely interoperable. It's just like Windows - things almost work most of the time. The poster above who mentioned voodoo is right on. From what I've seen, this isn't like science - you can't repeat someone else's experiment and get the same result. On the other hand, it's not totally random. There are discs that are problematic on most or all drives.

[RainDawg]

I just skimmed this thread, so maybe somebody said this, but I would bet neither the disc nor the drive were defective. With both CDs & DVDs you will find certain combinations of (1) make of disc, (2) type of drive it was burned on, and (3) type of drive you try to read it on that cause problems. (Probably should add (4) condition of the disc at the time you put it in the drive. I even wonder if it makes a difference whether it's still cold from the mailbox when you put it in a drive.)

Well, none of these were the case. I have about 250 Ritek discs, exactly the same. Most of them still work with the drive, and it's the same one they were all burned on. I just got one that refused to be read anymore. I've had the problem before, but a good lens-cleaning always solved it. This time, no dice. I think the laser is just wearing out....