A couple months back, I purchased a DVD-ROM called "40 Years of Avengers." The DVD has 40 years of Marvel Avengers comics in PDF (yes, it's a fully licensed, legal product), and is clearly burned on a Dual Layer DVD because it's 6.5 GB worth of data. When I brough it home, I found I could only see the comics from the 1960's folder. I tried it on three of my computers, and couldn't get it to work. Then I tried it on my Dad's and it came right up. I contacted their tech support, and they said they've gotten a few reports and thought they had a bad batch, so they sent me a new copy. Same problem. weeks later, I get copy number 3. Same Problem. Weeks later, finally, copy #4. Same problem.

By this point, I'm thinking there's gotta be more to the story here. So I start doing some experiments. I tried pulling the DVD drive from one of the computers that wouldn't read it, and hooked it up to one of the ones that would. It played without issue. So now I was really confused. Finally, I became DETERMINED to figure this out. So I formatted and reinstalled windows on one of my machines, and one by one stated reloading software, rebooting and testing the DVD. Each time, it worked just fine, untill I installed EMC 8. and then BOOM, all I see is the 1960's folder. Uninstalling fixes the problem.

The conclusion? EMC8 is causing some sort of issue with certain DVD's that only allows certain areas of the disc to be read.

Any idea what the story is here?

If it is in PDF, that would make it an Adobe issue…

However, I would try disabling D2D as a test. Should be an icon in your Systray. Right click it and select "Exit Drag to Disc".

No, it definetly would not be an adobe problem. It would be an adobe problem if I could not open the PDF files. I can't even SEE the files. I can't even see most of the folders the files should be in. Nor can I see the autopplay.ini, or the adobe reader installer, or anything else on the disc. And it doesn't matter if I have adobe installed or not, the problem persists. It has absolutely nothing to do with adobe. I know that part of the problem is the installation of D2D, you're right about that much; I'm currently installing the EMC 8 components one by one to see which ones contain the bug. I can tell you that simply disabling the D2D app doesn't help. I've tried that.

Can you post a directory listing from one of the DVDs in question showing the full path list, and then one after installing EMC 8 so we can see what is disappearing. Maybe that'll give us a clue as to what may be happening.