So I may have picked up a box of burned DVDs from someone on FB Marketplace. I was told they appear to be 2000s news broadcasts, religious shows, and other random things (like Presidential Debates, but those are probably archived in multiple places at this point) and I thought it might be useful for data preservation purposes. I know this sounds like a tech support or data recovery question off the rip, but I’ve done the research on what might be going on, and the potential fixes seem a bit beyond my ken. (I’m not a hardware person)
The discs I’ve tried are clearly burned (ring on the bottom and/or label on the top) but my computer shows them as blank. I spent about three hours searching for a potential fix – I don’t have the money for IsoBuster or I’d try that – and came to the conclusion that the likely problem is either they were burned off of a DVR and would only work on that, or they were burned using a format that my drive isn’t set up to read. I won’t discount disc rot since they’re pretty old, but even if disc rot has set in for the majority, by virtue of sheer numbers there is likely some unicorns that survived this long unscathed.
But any option of why my computer can’t read them is beyond what I can manage with my hardware or budget, which is why I’m posting here. Does anyone know of a product or service that might be able to help with reading/ripping the discs that won’t cost an arm and a leg?
Or, alternately, does anyone here already have a setup that might be able to read/rip them? I’d be happy to ship a handful of discs to test, or if you’re in the Portland, OR area I’d have no problem meeting to hand over the entire box. Shipping the entire box right off the rip would be prohibitively expensive, though, because there is A Lot and they are Very Heavy.
Thank you for your time!
You could try another optical drive? Maybe another brand. Could be the laser it’s using and the disks may have faded, and another drive might work.
They should definitely try another drive, preferably a DVD burner.
Also depends on the color of the bottom of the disc. Lighter colored discs (like yellow) are cheaper quality and can be more difficult to read. Darker blue or purple “azo” discs are better for long-term data storage.
Were these recorded with a DVD Recorder? Probably never closed the burn on the discs so they are ‘open’ and that gets funky with drives that didn’t burn the disc in the first place.
That’s pretty much what it is. I had one of those DVD DVRs back in the day, and they never finalized discs by default since the idea was that you’d mainly use them with the DVR itself, and the device can’t know when the right time to finalize is.
The ‘correct’ way to fix it would be to find the model of DVR used to record them and finalize the discs, but that’s pretty unlikely unless the seller also had the DVR on hand. I don’t know if there’s any regular burning software that would know how to do this.
I’m so curious. How much was the box?
This thread mentions a handful of other tools that might work and are cheaper or free: https://superuser.com/questions/148647/how-to-read-old-non-finalized-cds
Disc rot is exceedingly rare. Maybe you will find one or two in a box of a thousand perhaps.
What is very likely is they never finalised the discs. They will/may be able to be finalised in a dvd recorder.
Without finalisation there is no valid filesystem thus they appear blank.
When I get home I’ll give this a go, I usually use RW discs in my recorder, which ensures I dont need to finalise.
Probably recorded from TV using a DVD recorder and the discs were never finalized. If you can find a recorder by the same manufacturer you may be able to finalize them and rip them.
Get an LG DVD drive
Could you check if your local library has a media centre? That might be an easy option and they might support weirder file formats
We have some like this, but I’ve yet to try them: https://www.vpl.ca/facilities/digitize
Librarians are also good about archiving information, and they might be able to point you in the right direction.
I’d still try IsoBuster in free mode to see what it says !
If it too says the discs are blank then you need to try different hardware because it then means your disc drive sees the discs as blank (and as a consequence won’t read from them)
