On 01/06/2011 18:26, Jake wrote:
On Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:01:12 +0100,
wrote:

A friend has lent me some D VD's recorded off air to copy. 1 of them
can't be read by either of the DVD re-writers in my computer, or the two
drives I have in my hobby room.
The TV DVD re-writer comes back to tell me that they are empty, the TV
DVD player does not come up with a play list.
The first time this happened (4 D VD's ago) he told me that it had not
been finalized. He took it back and finalized it and it worked fine when
he brought it back for me.

All the D VD's are RW, but he is under the impression that if he
finalizes them he will not be able to re-write them.

In all the years I have used re-writable disks (CD or DVD) I have been
able to erase them and start again.

Can anyone help please?

Dave

Have you ruled out the possibility of the re-writers not being
compatible with the discs. For example my NEC re-writers won't work
with Zero Defex discs at all save for reading finalised ones and
there's no sign of NEC providing a firmware fix for this. Might be
worth checking your manufacturers' web sites to see if they (like NEC)
list the discs that work with the latest firmware for your drives.

My computer drives are compatable with all sorts of media, so no problem
there until I encountered friends disks.

The TV player won't read a non-finalised RW disk of course but for
brands which work on my rewriters I regularly finalise and
subsequently erase RW discs - my backup software routinely finalises
disks so they can be read by any restore device and then erases and
reuses the discs the next time they're used. If your friend cannot
erase discs he has finalised, then that may also point to some
incompatibility between drive/firmware and disc.

I'll not try finalizing the disk, as I do not own it and the contents
are quite rare.

Another surprisingly
common "problem" is that people buy the inkjet printable discs (which
don't have the R/RW symbol on each disc) and then mix up the lids of
the spindles they came on.

Just discovered a major problem with that type of disk. Last year I
copied Goodnight Mr Thom from a video I had and that started to pixilate
almost at the end where the lads future was decided. A wipe with IPA
usually cured it.

This time the DVD contained Ice cold in Alex, so I gave the shiny side a
clean up with IPA and then decided to give the label/data side a wipe.
DVD re-writer does not recognise it as a DVD :-(

Dave