Are there any tricks to reading a faulty CD/DVD?

Pottsey · 22 Apr 2008 at 08:52

One of our teachers handed me a mini 1.4gig dvd that’s not working, it’s a film dvd from the school camcorder. The dvd its self looks ok and you can see the data is on there but half the computers I tried don’t read the disk the other half say its blank.

The only thing I am aware of is to try lots of different brand of DVD drives and hope one reads it. Any other options?

dazz25 · 22 Apr 2008 at 09:08

Theres a prgram called ISOBuster which is used to extract data from a damaged CD/DVD.

thegoonden · 22 Apr 2008 at 09:19

It sounds like the camera has failed while recording. I've seen DVDR's do the same thing, if it glitches during recording, there is no index entry (not sure of correct term), written for the file and it's lost in limbo.

You may well be able to resuce the data with the above mentioned util, however, you may also find yourself having to play "hunt the mpeg header" with a hex editor. Fortunately, if the condtion is caused by the situation I described, the file shout be easy enough to spot.

Pottsey · 22 Apr 2008 at 09:43

Thanks going to look up ISOBuster now.
EDIT: EDIT: Looking good so far, its sees the data just doing a long scan now.