DVD recovery software - please

hi all,

I have couple of dvd's which consists of my family and loadz of pictures and videos of me and my friends. those are realy priceless to me
today I found that these 3 disks are damaged that I cant copy them on to my hard drive. I don't know how did they got damaged because I store them really carefully and its just old like 1 year or less. all other dvds I burnt along with this are work perfectly fine.

these dvds can be read on my home theater system(its playable on the player) but not even loaded by the desktop. but in my notebook the file list appears and when I tried to open or copy, its just getting stuck and not responding.

so, guys please help me to recover them. Im really really desperate here. I tried with Bad copy but no use. can you please suggest me best and reliable dvd recovery software which suits in this case...thanks in advance.

It seems likely to me that the media has degraded over time, and has become unreadable. Your best bet is to download a free program called IsoPuzzle (last version was 1.7 beta I believe) and use it to try to recover your discs, or at least it will recover as much as is possible to recover.

I will put an .iso file and .flg (i think) on your hard drive, and keep reading your disc over & over & over (forever, if you want) attempting to read bad sectors. You can pause the program at any time and restart it again, even using a different DVD-ROM drive or PC if you like (by moving the .flg and .iso files).

I know of no other (or better) tool for this. Even if your .iso never becomes complete i.e. IsoPuzzle can't recover all the bad sectors, you should be able to mount the .iso and play it with a PC player, though of course it will skip (and maybe freeze) on the missing sectors. Good luck.

Thank you ARC, fireberd and maxseven for your concern and quick reply. Im going to try out those.

Fireberd - thanks for the quick reply and suggestion. These were made with nero essentials as it came with the dvd writer when I brought it. Written on Imation DVD+R as Data disks. Theres not even a single scratch on disks. I stored them in a cupboard very safely using DvD album too.

about your suggestion, my player doesn't have that function. I mean copy to a another media with it. its not a much new model. But also I have experienced that many damaged or disks or disks that wouldn't load with a computer, can be played decently with my player. I don't have any idea about why. As Arc and maxseven suggested, I will try on those. Do you have an any alternative.
I think I can bare if it is also a any paid version of a software. these photos are just too valuable for me to lose.

fireberd said:

My copy suggestion was to have a separate standalone DVD burner unit and connect your theatre DVD player to that burner and make a new DVD.

That might be fine if all that is on the DVD is video; i.e. the player will play it (glitches and all) and the burner can record it, including the glitches.

But unless I misunderstand what exact hardware you are suggesting for this, the ONLY way to obtain a bit-perfect copy of the OP's DVDs is to copy them with a computer. And ImgBurn will likely give-up after X errors, dunno about MagicISO.

suspect008 your DVDs were not likely "damaged" by you in any way, the writeable DVDs you used are deteriorating, plain and simple, which is why you can never count on using DVD-recordable discs for long-term storage of data. They don't last forever (though they should last for more than a couple years-or-months!). You can buy "archival grade" DVDs that are better (and more expensive) than the el-cheapo discs everyone sells, and then make sure you have a high-quality burner, the best write speed selected, etc. and they STILL can't be expected to last "forever".

As I said the best tool to extract every last good/readable bit from your discs is IsoPuzzle, and if anyone knows a better tool at any price I too would like to know about it.

fireberd said:

Since the DVD's play OK on the home theatre DVD player, and they are home burned DVD's so they are not copy protected, connecting the output of the theatre DVD player to a standalone DVD burner, he should be able to burn new copies and finalize them so they can be played anywhere.

I've done that myself (not on ones that wouldn't work on a PC) to copy some home burned DVD's.

thanks guys, fireberd's sugestion maybe good but actually I have never done this before but I had known that this way is possible. but don't have a clue about how-to. with all do respect to your idea fireberd, thank you very much, but first I will try out some software solutions. If all fails, I will go for this method too. beside I got nothing to lose here. thanks again.:)