Several months ago I put an entire project on 9 dvds (data- the dv files).

A couple months ago I tried to transfer all the files back to my harddrive and it turns out for some reason there are massive underburns located sparatically throughout the discs. If there is an error at just one place in a 2 or 3 gig file windows will stop the transfer completely.

I have only been about to transfer over <25% of my original material.

I know there must be some software out there that will let me transfer this stuff over even if it must toss out certain parts because of the errors.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I would try reading these discs on as many systems as you can.

There are programs available that try to recover as much as
possible from a disc. One such programs is "BadCopy Pro"
(I have no experience with optical disc recovery programs)

Thanks for the suggestion. I will look in to that program you mentioned.

However, I'm not too hopeful because I can look on the burnt side of the disc and see two or 3 rings on each of the discs. Some of the rings are very visible.

I wonder how these discs got burnt like this to this exent?

Visible rings doesn't have to be a problem. You'll see these when
you do multiple sessions (on one disc) for example. Perhaps you
can see them with the lead in and out as well etc.?

Hrmm...

I don't really know. I went and looked an these only seem to appear on these bad batch of discs.

I really don't know what was causing the underburns either.

I've burnt hundreds of video-dvds with maybe 5 bad discs total.

However I also burned about 15-25 data dvds during this time. When I went back and checked these discs a couple months later I found that most had serious errors on them.

I then updated my sony's firmware to a much newer version and got nero instead of using the crappy sonic software that came with my drive.

I have not burnt many data discs since this - maybe 5 and I don't believe I verified them for accuracy either. I will try to check their accuracy soon.

I have however burned many audio cd's and about 50% of the time I will have some error show up when I verify the disc. Sometimes its just a couple bad segments. Sometimes theres a ton. I even burn the audio cd's of rates all the way down to 4x - to no avail. Same ~50% rate.

Still burning tons of video-dvds though with less than a 1% failure rate. (tested by playing back in a consumer dvd player)


I'm wondering if maybe I should just get a new drive? I thought the sony's were pretty good though - their ratings are about average...

There is software available for recovery of data from corrupted or damaged media, such as BadCopy Pro (http://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/). Of course, there is no guarantee it will work. There is freeware available as well and you can probably find it easily with a google search.

John

i posted the exact same problem with under-burned rings out here a few months ago, and they were caused by a sony burner... get rid of that sony garbage, and get yourself a pioneer or nec asap.

your best bet now is to maybe use the original sony burner to try and read those bogus discs.

Sounds like a good idea. I'm going to try to wait on the new 109 pioneer to come down in price a bit.

I tried that badcopypro software and it locked up when it started hitting the underburnt files.

Guess I'm just out of luck....

Hello Brandon,

Just a wild guess here:

Check that the DVD-burner really has DMA mode turned on. If not strange things can happen - like "hang ups" when driving the drive "hard".

When it comes to burners, I do really like my Philips DVD-burner the most - compared to my Pioneer and NEC.

// Lazze