Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

Nothing strange. R-Studio analyses data the hardware sends to it. In your case the DVD drive failed to read the disc and therefore R-Studio had nothing to analyse. The other drive failed to read, too. The third drive was able to read data and you was able to copy the files. That's quite often happens with DVD/CD discs. I have special DVD and CD drives that often read data from those discs that are unreadable in other drives. Other data recovery specialists have such recovery drives, too.

OK - so this gets stranger

I have attempted to read this DVD with two different drives, on different laptops (one runs Vista, one runs Windows 7) - with no success. Rstudio was run on the machine running Windows 7. This suggested it was the disk that was at fault.

Another laptop, running Windows 7, was able to see all the files on the disk, correctly reported overall capacity, and allowed me to copy the files to other media.

So what I'm struggling with is that if the disk was sufficiently intact to be able to run in at least one drive, why Rstudio failed even to correctly register the disk capacity.

Oh well - at least I've got the data off!

Martin

[quote="martinclayden"]
RStudio says it cannot reconstruct the file system on the disk[/quote]
This is not a problem of R-Studio, the DVD drive cannot correctly read data on the DVD disc.
[quote="martinclayden"]
What if I attempted to format it to create one - would the remainder of the disk be scannable ?[/quote]

Most likely, the data track on the DVD disc is damaged. If you do a quick format of the disc, that won't touch the data track and it'll still be unreadable, you you full-format the disc, a new data track will be created, and the old one will be completely destroyed.

My advice is to go to a data recovery professional. Some of them have special DVD drives that can read even damaged data tracks on DVD/CD discs.

That's disappointing

RStudio says it cannot reconstruct the file system on the disk

What if I attempted to format it to create one - would the remainder of the disk be scannable ?

Martin

Most likely, this is the DVD drive that reports this size to R-Studio. Maybe, another drive will do better, but I doubt. When DVD / CD disks gone, they gone completely.

I have a DVD +RW disk, used many times, which has become corrupt in some way

When the disk is accessed by RStudio the capacity is reported as 2Kb in the scan process. RStudio fails to find any files.

How do I force a scan of the full, true physical capacity of 3.9Gb

TIA

Martin