Having issue with DVD-R disks, help?

[annathepiper]

Hey folks,

So I made me a couple of data DVDs when I updated newmoon and lodestone to Debian 5--since I wanted to have me a quick and dirty archive copy of the various servers' backup files before I upgraded the OS. The upgrade went okay, but the problem I have now is that the DVDs I burned are apparently corrupted somehow.

Does anybody know of any clever tricks I can do to pull data back off of the discs, or am I just screwed? (Note: recovery of this data is not urgent, I have later valid backups, I'm mostly just interested here for intellectual purposes.)

What I've tried so far:

* Straight copy of files off the discs in OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu
* In OS X, putting the discs in the drive, unmounting that drive, and then using dd to try to generate an ISO

In all cases I eventually get either an input/output error, or an error about failure to allocate memory, or a failure to find the files I'm trying to get at. If I just cd to the disk in a shell, ls thinks it can find the files. It's just actually acting on the data that's failing.

The DVDs in question are data DVDs, DVD-R's specifically, TDK brand. They were originally burned in my drive in Winnowill, which has not previously given me problems, and the burn was just a straight burn out of OSX. Which went fine as far as I remember, although it's been a few weeks at this point.

Thanks in advance for any cluage!

Comments

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

I R computer illiterate, but my spouse is not and she suggested a program called ISObuster, developed specifically for this purpose ( I read them a skim of your post and that is how she replied); she has had some postiive results w/this program, tho it doesn't *always* recover stuff.

[annathepiper]

Please thank your spouse for the tip! I downloaded a trial version of the program but it seems to be having the same issue with data errors on the disc. It was a good thought though.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

One way to determine if there's actually media errors present is to pop it into a *nix box of some form and run dd on it. E.g.

dd if=/dev/rdvddevicedujour of=/dev/null

if it makes it through this, you may have an intact media with a damaged file system. That helps narrow your fixes.

[annathepiper]

Tried to use dd already, I should have mentioned--I was going to try to use it to generate an ISO image, and that threw I/O errors too.

[katatomic.livejournal.com]

What is the specific error you're getting? (Hubby is a Linux d00d.)

[annathepiper]

solarbird has already suggested I toss the discs, so I can no longer reproduce the exact error, I fear. Thanks for checking with me anyway!

(Though I was getting input/output errors on pretty much any operation I tried on the discs, including using the dd command in Linux to try to generate an ISO image file.)