Unreadable Cd's And Dvd's

[wvdleek]

On my old computer with XP, I used Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 to burn my digital photos at forst on CD's and later on DVD's.

My present computer is running on 64 bits Windows 7.

Last week I needed a photo from my 2002 collection, but the CD was not recognised.

I tried some other CD's and sometimes only a few photos can be copied from the CD to my hard drive, but most cannot.

With the help of a recovery program I succeeded to recover 11.000 photos, but a little more cannot be recovered.

 

I used to store my photos in seperate folders and used Roxio 6 to burn those folders to the CD's.

 

Roxio 6 cannot be installed on my Windows 7 machine.

 

Any useful advise will be appreciated.

 

Thanks,

 

Willem

[cdanteek]

Did you use Direct CD or Drag to Disc to burn the photos to the CD's and DVD's in Easy CD and DVD Creator 6?

[wvdleek]

Did you use Direct CD or Drag to Disc to burn the photos to the CD's and DVD's in Easy CD and DVD Creator 6?

 

No, I used Classic Creator.

[cdanteek]

No, I used Classic Creator.

 

So all the CD's and DVD's were unreadable?

 

Did you finalize and close the disc's?

[d_deweywright]

Using Creator Classic would have automatically closed the session, if not the disc, so that shouldn't be an issue.

 

This would demonstrate the need to:

 

a ) verify readability of your backup media on initial creation

b ) verify readability regularly over time

c ) not depend on the longevity of optical media over time (despite manufacturer's claims)

 

Do you have more recent backups and have you checked those for readability? And if so, what have you found?

[cdanteek]

Using Creator Classic would have automatically closed the session, if not the disc, so that shouldn't be an issue.

 

This would demonstrate the need to:

 

a ) verify readability of your backup media on initial creation

b ) verify readability regularly over time

c ) not depend on the longevity of optical media over time (despite manufacturer's claims)

 

Do you have more recent backups and have you checked those for readability? And if so, what have you found?

 

Might of closed the session but not the disc if it is a data disc project.

[d_deweywright]

Agreed, but a closed disc vs. a closed session doesn't mean much as far as readability. A closed disc just means that there's no "Lead in" block after the last session to allow for another session. The last session is still closed, and even a CD-ROM drive can read that okay.

[wvdleek]

Using Creator Classic would have automatically closed the session, if not the disc, so that shouldn't be an issue.

 

This would demonstrate the need to:

 

a ) verify readability of your backup media on initial creation

b ) verify readability regularly over time

c ) not depend on the longevity of optical media over time (despite manufacturer's claims)

 

Do you have more recent backups and have you checked those for readability? And if so, what have you found?

 

After the end of the burning session, Classic Creator opens the disc-drive, so you might think all is well.

We did look at the photos via a dvd-player.

I am still verifying all my discs and since July 2009 I have not used any Roxio program as it did not work on my Windows 7 machine.

[wvdleek]

Agreed, but a closed disc vs. a closed session doesn't mean much as far as readability. A closed disc just means that there's no "Lead in" block after the last session to allow for another session. The last session is still closed, and even a CD-ROM drive can read that okay.

 

I allways got the message 'witing lead out' and after that was finished, the drive opened to take the disc out.

[cdanteek]

Agreed, but a closed disc vs. a closed session doesn't mean much as far as readability. A closed disc just means that there's no "Lead in" block after the last session to allow for another session. The last session is still closed, and even a CD-ROM drive can read that okay.

 

Hard to believe all his disc's went south!

 

[d_deweywright]

Hard to believe all his disc's went south!

I agree. Waiting to hear how his more recent discs have fared.

[Brendon]

Hard to believe all his disc's went south!

 

With the help of a recovery program I succeeded to recover 11.000 photos, but a little more cannot be recovered.

 

Willem said his collection was dated 2002, it's now 10-11 years later. I think it's the media, rather than the writing software. It looks to me as if his media have been degrading.

If his original blanks were not top quality, and if the collection was not stored under optimal conditions, then his results aren't that surprising.

[wvdleek]

Just checked an other dvd, burned after 30 November 20007. It contains 10 folders.

Of folder 9, only 79 out of 112 jpg's can be read and copied to my hard drive.

Folder 10 contains 83 jpg's and cannot be read.

Luckily, my friend in London does have these photos stored on a hard drive and when he is coming to Holland next May, he weill bring them on a USB-stick.

 

Now going to check the next disc.

[sknis]

You didn't use RW discs did you? What brand of CD or DVD or did you use different brands?

[wvdleek]

You didn't use RW discs did you? What brand of CD or DVD or did you use different brands?

 

No, I did not use RW discs, only R+.

I cannot see the name of the brands of the used cd's as I sticked labels on them.

 

The last three discs I checked, were Sony DVD+R.

The first one contains photos of the 2007 cruise and has 15 folders, only 8 can be restored.

The second one is described in the message just above,

The third one has 17 folders (between 7 Sep 2006 and 25 Jul 2007. Folders 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11 and 12 could be restored, all others are damaged.

Unfortunately, some of the damaged folders contain photos of ships which are no longer in service as they have been scrapped.

[d_deweywright]

Do all of your discs have stick-on labels? On a CD-R these can definitely cause problems because you essentially stick them onto the back side of the reflective surface. Depending on temperature and humidity, the labels shrink and swell, and can pull the reflective layer off the dye layer. They shouldn't cause such problems on a DVD+/-R disc since the reflective and dye surfaces are between layers of polycarbonate.

 

Back to a previous question, when you first wrote the discs, did you try to read all the pictures back off? Or is this the first time you've tried to access these files since the discs were written?

 

I'm glad to hear you have a friend with a(nother) backup of at least some of your photos. I know how distressing it can be to lose them. (I thought I had lost a couple years worth of digital photos at one point until I finally located the backup disc I'd made.)

[wvdleek]

Do all of your discs have stick-on labels? On a CD-R these can definitely cause problems because you essentially stick them onto the back side of the reflective surface. Depending on temperature and humidity, the labels shrink and swell, and can pull the reflective layer off the dye layer. They shouldn't cause such problems on a DVD+/-R disc since the reflective and dye surfaces are between layers of polycarbonate.

 

Back to a previous question, when you first wrote the discs, did you try to read all the pictures back off? Or is this the first time you've tried to access these files since the discs were written?

 

I'm glad to hear you have a friend with a(nother) backup of at least some of your photos. I know how distressing it can be to lose them. (I thought I had lost a couple years worth of digital photos at one point until I finally located the backup disc I'd made.)

 

I found that I used following brand for cd+R's: Silver Circle, Imation, Maxell and Emtec.

The labels are sticked on the topside where the brand's name and other information is printed.

 

Most of the discs we have viewed on the tv-screen by playing them on the dvd-player. Especially those of our vacations. Most of the other photos are from ships visiting the ports of Amsterdam and/or Rotterdam.

 

The disc with the photos of our very first cruise in December 2003 are lost as the disc is not recognised in the drive.

The 2005 and 2006 cruises are on a harddrive in London with our friend.

The 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 cruise photos are safe as they were still on the hard drive.

Also some more important photos are saved, like when I was in Gibraltar when the s.s. Rotterdam V arrived, my visits to that ship when she was in Wilhelmshaven (Germany) and het coming home in August 2008.

 

It is very strange as by trying to copy photos from the disc to the hard drive, it sometimes happens that the first two folders are o.k. and suddenly halfway an other folder, the system simply blocks as the image cannot be read.

[sknis]

Sometimes that is a sign that just that one image is corrupted and the computer can't skip it. I'm sure that you have cleaned the discs properly. You said you used a recovery program to get the photos back; which one? Perhaps a different one will do more.

 

Some people (including me) have multiple back ups. One on stored discs and one on a hard drive used just for storage). Today's portable hard drives (essentially a bunch of solid state drives in a enclosure) are inexpensive. 500 g are less than $50 (us) and 1T are less than $100 (us). Cloud storage is getting less expensive especially if it is one that is an option to a photo editing piece of software. Perhaps with the valuable images, it is time to spend some money on other back up methods.

[d_deweywright]

Perhaps with the valuable images, it is time to spend some money on other back up methods.

...such as paper. I consider a "hard copy" of a photo to be a valid and potentially durable archival method. Think how many photos over 100 years old still exist, and are still "viewable" today. Photo albums may be bulky, but they don't take any power, software, or electronics to share with someone as you reminisce. I'm very guilty of not printing as many pictures as we used to when we used film cameras.

[wvdleek]

...such as paper. I consider a "hard copy" of a photo to be a valid and potentially durable archival method. Think how many photos over 100 years old still exist, and are still "viewable" today. Photo albums may be bulky, but they don't take any power, software, or electronics to share with someone as you reminisce. I'm very guilty of not printing as many pictures as we used to when we used film cameras.

 

From the cruises I made a printed photo-album with a selection of the whole bunch.

From the shipvisits as well as the ships calling in Amsterdam and/or Rotterdam and our cruises, I also made an on-line photo-album which visitors can be access via my website http://www.vdleek.nl

 

The internal harddrive in my pc is 320 Gig, I also have an external harddrive of 500 Gig and last week I purchased an other one of 1 TB. I intend to store all photos and other important stuff on both external harddrives.

 

I used Recovery Toolbox (free version) and Recover Disc 2.0 from Isobuster (the free trial version extracts only 2 files per day) and I just found CDRoller, but that trial version does not extract files.

[d_deweywright]

Glad to hear you have prints of at least a selection of your photos!

 

I've used ISOBuster previously to recover video files off a DVD. For recovery of files on a hard drive, I've used RecoverMyFiles, which has worked very well. (I don't believe RecoverMyFiles supports optical media.) Always good to have some of these tools on hand. (In one case, an exchange student we were hosting had moved files from her camera onto a drive I later formatted, not realizing she'd removed the files from her flash drive. We got all her pictures back! Whew!)

[bimicher]

I found that I used following brand for cd+R's: Silver Circle, Imation, Maxell and Emtec.

The labels are sticked on the topside where the brand's name and other information is printed.

 

Most of the discs we have viewed on the tv-screen by playing them on the dvd-player. Especially those of our vacations. Most of the other photos are from ships visiting the ports of Amsterdam and/or Rotterdam.

 

The disc with the photos of our very first cruise in December 2003 are lost as the disc is not recognised in the drive.

The 2005 and 2006 cruises are on a harddrive in London with our friend.

The 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 cruise photos are safe as they were still on the hard drive.

Also some more important photos are saved, like when I was in Gibraltar when the s.s. Rotterdam V arrived, my visits to that ship when she was in Wilhelmshaven (Germany) and het coming home in August 2008.

 

It is very strange as by trying to copy photos from the disc to the hard drive, it sometimes happens that the first two folders are o.k. and suddenly halfway an other folder, the system simply blocks as the image cannot be read.

 

Pasting labels on discs is for me a n-no. They can easily create unbalance and the heat generated whil playing can loosen the labels and really damage your players.

 

Have you tried playing the discs on a DVD player and do you have the same problem?

[wvdleek]

CDRoller is now testing a disc running for 1 hr 30 mins and still 45 mins to go. Just testing a dvd with 1314 files.

[sknis]

I had good luck with "Adroid Photo Recovery" . the one time my son screwed up a memory stick. Nothing else worked.

[wvdleek]

O/K/, it has taken some time trying to recover my photos from the CD's and DVD's.

I was able to get a full version of CD Roller, and allthough it is a very good and usefull program, I am still not able to recover all.

 

When a CD of DVD is recognised by the system, following message appears on the screen:

 

 

 

and than only half of the total files can be copied to my harddrive.