Recorded DVD or CD contains data but appears blank in windows xp

This is good piece of information. It used to happen with me in college time and Now I know the reason. Thanks for the info

I have a couple of DVD with photos and home movies, it worked ok on stand alone DVD player, now it does’nt. Its stored correctly, and handled only by me.
I tried to get “Image Burn” freeware application to read it and convert it into an ISO image. Some of the DVD will read correctly up to 70 or 35%, and Image burn will inform me that sectors contains errors.
These DVDs contain precious family photos and movies, do you know how I can recover the information from the failed DVDs, and or repair it with some application, so I can have it stored in my PC as an ISO Image.
My other question this. When we rent or buy a commercial DVD eg like a movie, the DVD takes a lot of rough handling, and the shiny part shows no visible burnt tracks as the ones I burn on my DVD. How come?

Would appreciate your reply
joe hill

Hi Joe

Thanks for leaving a comment at TroubleFixers.com.
Regarding your question, DVD which we burn ourselves are generally not
that rugged as the ones which are available commercial movie/games DVD
as they are manufactured by slightly different manufacturing processes
as they are to be written only once.

The best way to preserve your personal DVDs is to handle them with
care and keep them in a moisture free and dust free casing when not in
use. Always buy the best quality blank disks available.

Also, there are certain softwares like Virtual CD, which can help you
recover data from a scratched disc, using some error correction
algorithms. But there is no guaranty that it will recover it always,
but its worth giving a try. One more thing you can do is, try reading
the disc using a new DVD ROM/writer, as its lens may be in a better
position to read the data from a scratched disc. From that u can take
the backup.

One more tip: When you are burning important DVDs, write them at less
than maximum supported speed, that also helps.

I hope the information will help you.

Hey Rohit
I’m plagued by this issue as well. But a few things:
1) You are right about the IMAPI thing but installing SP2 will not help. I have this issue with SP2 installed.
2) This issue occurs on linux as well with me if I install NeroLinux.
3) So far I’ve found that the only solution is to uninstall the offending software (Nero in my case)

Hi! I find this info very useful. I uninstalled my ExpressBurn and then I was able to read my data DVD. Now that i uninstalled my burning software, what free burning software would you recommend me? I’ve got Burn4free but it cannot burn movie DVD.

Btw, I’m using Windows Vista.