Burned media interpreted as blank

[altceva]

I burn a lot of DVDs (various brands) on an LG DVD Writer with Nero 7, and I just realized a lot of the discs of a particular brand (Imation) are described as blank when I put them in the DVD drive. It's clear that the discs have been written (I can see that by looking on the back of the disc) and I definitely got no error messages from Nero when burning them, so what is causing the problem?

I don't need obvious advice like "Don't buy Imation" (obviously I'm not gonna do that again since I only had trouble with this brand), what I wanna know is why it happens and most importantly is there any way to recover that information?

 

[raybay]

Imation discs are the bottom of the barrel, and have problems with certain brands of DVD drives. You might try discs from Memorex or Maxell, as a test.
Sometimes the drive which has trouble with Imation also has trouble with Sony so don't use Sony as a test.
DVD Writers last about a year, give or take. Heavily used ones sometimes only last 9 months. So it is possible your drive lasers are getting out of alignment and will totally fail soon.

 

[altceva]

Ok, but why do I get no error messages? And again, is there any way to recover the information?

 

[poertner_1274]

Have you tried putting the Imation DVDs into someone else's drive? Do they show as full there?

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Thanks.

 

[altceva]

I put them in another drive, this one acts as if there's no disk in the drive whatsoever.

 

[DelJo63]

sounds like the burn was never finalized

 

[raybay]

I do not know of any of the hundreds of optical drives that give you error messages when there is a failure. They are very unsophisticated. The price competition, and the constant model changes make it ridiculous when they are such short lived devices.
One effort that sometimes works, is take note of the model number on the drive, then go to the computer brand and model website, or to the optical drive website to see if there is a Firmware update. Installing new firmware will help a lot of drives... temporarily.
As for the date you have perhaps lost, try the disc in a brand new quality drive from Phillips, Yamaha, Pioneer, LG, Samsung, or other known reliable optical drive to see if it is detected or read there. However, often if it was burned by a laser out of alignment, you will need a similarly misaligned drive to read it... the tolerances are so very, very narrow.
There are firms with professional drives, where they can tweak the laser and the speed who rescue data all the time. But their drives cost $600 to $900 so the cost of rescue will be rather expensive.

 

[altceva]

Thanks for the replies. I decided to take 3 steps:

1. Set Nero to not auto-eject the disk after the burn, in order to make sure that the disk CAN in fact be read, regardless of whether Nero gives or does not give an error.

2.I bought a new LG drive (couldn't find anyhting but LG, Asus and TEAC where I went, and I thought between those, LG sounded the safest), the other was about 2 years old and very heavily used

3.I'm not going to buy any more Imation discs. I didn't have these kinds of problems with Verbatim, Memorex and Traxdata yet, so I think I'll be sticking with these brands.

About the data, well, I think I may be able to get it back from some sources, but it's gonna take awhile. Hope those steps will minimize the risks of this happening again. So again, thx for the answers.

 

[ravisunny2]

Some thing similar just happened (for the first time).

I have a Gigabyte GO-R5232C, about 14 months old. I'm usung Nero 6

There was no error msg & even the verification went fine.

But when I tried to read from the CD, it showed up as blank.

When I used Nero again on the same CD, 'make data disk', the files showed up.

So I tried another CD. Same problem.

Then I tried some other CDs, that I was pretty sure were fine. They weren't recognized.

I thought the CD writer had gone bad.

Then for the heck of it, I rebooted the PC, and all of the above CDs worked normally.

Is this a freak incident, or is it an indication that the writer is on its way out ?

 

[raybay]

This can happen if your optical drive is aging, and slipping out of alignment as the temperature changes.

 

[ravisunny2]

Thanks, raybay.