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Floop
06-07-2010, 10:43
Hi,

Long story short, took three pieces of video, using three Sony mini DVDs on one of their mini-DVD camcorders.

Disc 1 recorded fine, finalised, ejected, readable on the computer.

Disc 2 seemed to record fine, but at ehd, refused to finalise, came up with 'video recording disabled', ejected, but not readable on computer or camera.

Disc 3 recorded fine, finalised, ejected, readable on the computer.

Obviously Disc 2 is the problem. My understanding is that these cameras write to disc as they go along, and all they do at the end is 'finalise' the disc to make it readable. This obviously didn't happen with Disc 2.

What I want to do is get the video data off of Disc 2. When I instert it into a PC, I can see the disc and the structure but there is nothing of any substance in there.

This is because I believe that the PC is only seeing an old partition, and that had the disc been finalised properly, the disc would then show the newly recorded video data.

However, as the disc has NOT been finalised, I have a problem.

The camcorder refuses to finalise the disc, and it just says "video recording disabled" onscreen when this disc is in the machine. I cannot see or playback and videoclips from this disc on the camcorder.

However, my feeling is the data MUST be on the disc, because it records as it goes along, and if the data is on the disc then there must be a way to get it off the disc!

I have tried a few things, e.g. Isobuster and a program called DVD inspector, but they just see the 'old' partition, and not the data which I believe is on the disc but which has not been finalised.

Has anybody got any helpful suggestions of how I can find and get at the video data?

Many thanks!

Floop

driver8
06-07-2010, 11:14
I'm unfamiliar with your hardware, but can the PC connect to the cam to see the data off it that way - as if the cam (disk) was an external drive ? In my experience, the best drive for reading a dodgy disc is the one that created it.

And I think you'll need some sort of data recovery tool anyway - hmmm ... I see that ISObuster is the most recommended one, and you've tried that.

There's an article here - Recovery Tips For Errored, Damaged Or Unfinalized DVDs (http://ezinearticles.com/?Recovery-Tips-For-Errored,-Damaged-Or-Unfinalized-DVDs&id=996641) and here - DVD repair tips (http://www.dvdrepairtips.com/unfinalized-dvds.html).

Found a snippet here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=115347), and a discussion using Nero to finalise, here (http://www.trcb.com/computers-and-technology/data-recovery/dvd-disc-repair-tips-for-scratched-dvds-unfinalized-dvds-and-data-recovery-3877.htm).

Oh - and some kind of test disc, here (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download).

Good luck !

Floop
11-07-2010, 14:14
Hi,

Thanks driver8 for your support with this and I am happy to report I salvaged the data!

IsoBuster came to my rescue in the end - I had tried it initially and it only saw about 40MB of data on the disc, so I assumed that the recorded data must have been written to a different partition that it was not letting me view because the disc had not been finalised.

However, I then found a feature in IsoBuster which examines that disc for files, and it found the data - it seems that my video *was* on the partition that I was originally looking at, it was just either 'invisible', or not showing up in the filesystem.

Anyway IsoBuster found these stray files - an 800MB one and a 350MB one - which I thought could be the ones I was looking for, but to extract them I had to buy the full version, which was $30 - I thought it was worth a punt so dropped my credit card details in and registered the program. Half an hour later the files were extracted, and they played perfectly in VNC!

So I heartily recommend IsoBuster to anyone who is in this situation again. And I also heartily disrecommend Sony's crappy DVD-R based camcorders!!

Floop

P.S. Are you an REM fan by any chance?!

driver8
11-07-2010, 17:30
Good news, Floop.

REM fan - of course ! ;)