Has this ever happened to you?

I have had my old 8 mm home movies films transferred professionally to DVD. The DVDs are
not copy protected in any way. When I copy one of these original DVDs using the Toast
IDENTICAL COPY Option, I have no problem as the DVD is copied in a few minutes and then
Toast ejects that DVD and asks that a blank DVD be inserted onto which to copy!

However, when I then try to make a copy of the copy (instead of the original), Toast begins
to copy and after a few minutes, the progress bar goes to zero (0.00) but the program
freezes there and does not allow me to continue with the process. It will not even allow me to
cancel and so I have to Force Quit.

Can anyone speculate why this should happen because the copy in question is supposedly
IDENTICAL to the original?

This is important to me in case the original becomes damaged and can no longer be used.

Thanks to anyone who can help.
richrcrph@att.net

I don't know if I've ever tried doing that. The problem could be Toast or it could be the media or the drive itself. You might do a test by inserting one of the copied DVDs and choosing Save as disc image from the File menu rather than clicking the burn button. When Toast finishes the disc image hopefully it won't freeze like it did with your effort. If it doesn't freeze then use the Image File setting in the Copy window to make your additional copy.

If it does freeze there still are other ways to try. For instance, you can drag the VIDEO_TS folder from the burned DVD to the desktop. Assuming it doesn't stall when being copied you can use the DVD video from VIDEO_TS setting in the Toast Video window to burn your new DVD.

Thanks for the tips but neither one worked. In both cases, I got a message saying "The file VTS-01-1 VOB could not be accessed (Data fork,-36)!

I had actually made some Disk Images of the originals the day before using Disk Utility on the Mac. (I hadn't realized you could make Disk Images with Toast) Disk Utility was able to make them with the Original DVDs (as did Toast) and also with the copies except that I could not burn them properly from Disk Utility (I have an external DVD Burner) and Toast was able to burn some of the disk images but the DVD copy they produced again could not make a copy.

And even if these work around procedures did work consistently, it is a curiosity to me why a so called "Identical Original" (as Toast calls it) is not really an identical Original if it does not behave in the exact same way in all respects as the original.

Apparently Toast is producing copies that make them appear copy protected even when they are not. I have even compared the folders of both Video TS (the original and the copy) and they appear to be the same. I think that there might be a bug in Toast 7.1.3 causing this problem.

Any additional comments would be appreciated.

There was a problem with some version of Toast (I don't recall which) where it would fail to correctly burn a second DVD unless the application was Quit and reopened. The first one would be fine but the additional ones wouldn't work. As I recall that was fixed in a Toast update. It may be that the discs that can't be copied are ones that were burned in sequence during one session with Toast.

I'm not certain that Disk Utility makes a UDF-formatted copy of video DVDs. I know that people need to use a freeware application called DVD Imager in order to make a UDF-formatted disc image from a VIDEO_TS folder before they can use Disk Utility to burn that DVD. It may be that Disk Utility retains the UDF format when making a copy from a video DVD but it can't create a UDF formatted disc from scratch. The DVD must be in UDF format to work on a standalone DVD player.

As for burning to an external drive with Disk Utility, I suggest going to http://www.patchburn.de/ and installing the version of Patchburn that's for your OS. It can often expand burning to external drives using Apple's various burn applications.

Toast is not adding copy protection to your DVDs. It has no ability to do that. But something obviously is wrong. Toast 8 and 9 have a disc repair feature which allows Toast to copy content from a damaged disc (it takes a long time). I wonder if that would work with these.