ubuysa
The BSOD Doctor
Has anyone on here ever been down the damaged DVD recovery route and can suggest a software tool that can help? I'm currently running through the trial versions of all the DVD recovery tools I can find, but most of these tools won't even run unless Windows has recognised and loaded the disk - the one I'm testing now will run but it's been scanning the disk for over 6 hours already and is at 70%, so this is going to be a long process.
The DVD in question is one of three. I took a shed load of camcorder video on a USA coast-to-coast trip we did in 1998 and later had it 'professionally' transferred to DVD. All three DVDs have played in the past but as you might imagine we've not watched them for 15 years or so. Disks 2 and 3 are fine and I've transferred those to mp4 and backed them up in several places, so they're good. Disk 1 will only load and play on one DVD player I have (a cheap Shinco portable player). I've tried it on around 8 other DVD players, PCs and laptops and none will load it. I can physically connect the AV-Out on the Shinco player to my PC and copy the video as it comes in, but even on that player it stutters and eventually stops altogether.
The disk looks ok. There are some very superficial scratches on it but nothing that should cause these problems. I've no idea what type of disk this is, whether it's +R or -R nor of what quality, there's nothing on the disk to identify it. It seems a little more serious than just the classic 'incompatible drive/writer' problems we've become used to with writable DVDs.
So if anyone has been down this route before and knows of a tool that works with a DVD that Windows doesn't want to load I'd love to know. I'll gladly pay for a tool that can recover some or most of the video on this disk.
The DVD in question is one of three. I took a shed load of camcorder video on a USA coast-to-coast trip we did in 1998 and later had it 'professionally' transferred to DVD. All three DVDs have played in the past but as you might imagine we've not watched them for 15 years or so. Disks 2 and 3 are fine and I've transferred those to mp4 and backed them up in several places, so they're good. Disk 1 will only load and play on one DVD player I have (a cheap Shinco portable player). I've tried it on around 8 other DVD players, PCs and laptops and none will load it. I can physically connect the AV-Out on the Shinco player to my PC and copy the video as it comes in, but even on that player it stutters and eventually stops altogether.
The disk looks ok. There are some very superficial scratches on it but nothing that should cause these problems. I've no idea what type of disk this is, whether it's +R or -R nor of what quality, there's nothing on the disk to identify it. It seems a little more serious than just the classic 'incompatible drive/writer' problems we've become used to with writable DVDs.
So if anyone has been down this route before and knows of a tool that works with a DVD that Windows doesn't want to load I'd love to know. I'll gladly pay for a tool that can recover some or most of the video on this disk.