Please Help: Ritek RG04 lost data, Recovery possible?

About 4 years ago I transferred many hours of 8mm camcorder footage on to Ritek RG04 Rivision DVD-R4X disks, some recorded on a Pioneer standalone and some on the PC via Roxio software, I got some out to watch today and find that they are all unplayable! On a standalone message "cannot play media" and on the PC "drive not responding" and a XPS laptop just spits them out,

Can anyone help me recover the footage, at the time these where the most recommended disks, what has gone wrong?

First off they are Ritek discs and Ritek is not a very reliable brand to use it reminds me of the old Ritek G05 fiasco where
the data scaned and played great for a few weeks and maybe a month or so and than bang your data was un-playable
and most of the time gone for good. You can try to recover your data/movies by using something like ISOBuster and see
if it can recover anything off of the discs http://www.isobuster.com/ it has saved my data several times from a few bad
and normally un-readable discs it is at least worth a try you can use the free part of it to recover data with just click on
use the free button. Just a word of warrning it takes quite a while to recover your data so don't get in too big of a hurry
when using ISOBuster you have to give it time to do its thing.

thanks

I know this thread is a week old (haven't got my observant head on), but I just thought I'd drop an idea in for the OP or anyone who stumbles across this thread in the future.

When my G05s started to go south (my LG 4163B wouldn't even recognise the discs), I recovered all my data by reading the discs on an old LiteOn LDW-851S burner.

If you have a mate with either a LiteOn or a newer Samsung drive (both have the MediaTek chipset), then there may be a chance of recovery with one of those.

For repair of any computer or peripheral, I always keep an old laptop running Debian GNU/Linux, though running some of its tools from a bootable CD should usually suffice.

Here's a command-line program that might help, although I use gddrescue:

http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

This assumes your Digital8 or Hi8 tapes (in DV format) were converted to DVD and once played. :-)

Petrologist

PS. Though my family has Macs, I keep Debian Linux (little-endian, ext3 disk format) around to repair these machines (big-endian, HFS+ disk format), for MacOSX is short on repair utilities. The GNOME desktop is very attractive, and my 5-year old granddaughter uses the machine to play educational games when I don't need it (as in Jurassic Park).

Although DVD reading is stochastic (sometimes you succeed, sometimes not) and not deterministic (read failure is not always followed by another read failure), I wouldn't try ddrescue first.

In fact, in my experience, dvd drive reading ability decreases as its internal temperature rises. Ddrescue or any other software that tries to re-read the disc several times at sector level is a good way to raise the temps.

This is not to say, ddrescue might not work, but I'd use that last.

I'd do personally what Arachne suggested, try a LiteOn or a Samsung DVD-burner. They are really good readers for many of the badly burned/archived discs. Mucho better than almost any LG drive.

I agree with everyone. :-)

During some light readings about DVD, I remember reading that drives fail before discs; the lifespan of the average DVD player was 6 months to 3 years. My USD$ 40 ones live about a year, and my iBook's DVD reader failed in 3 years. If the discs were written using new drives, perhaps newer drives will read them.

Just to complete the thread, I should mention that I buy only Taiyo Yuden DVD-R or Verbatim DVD+R (for LightScribe) from reliable internet stores, when on sale. Though DVD-RW can be rewritten a thousand or so times, one imprint (glass) will last only about 6 months (when it recrystallizes). The earlier supposedly have lifespans in the hundreds of years; but remember: DVDs are translucent, and must be kept from light and diurnal temperature changes (for their medium isn't perfectly elastic).

Given their inability to be recognized by three drives, I too don't think your errors are random ('stochastic'). Changes in design (specifications), manufacturer, firmware, operating system, and age all affect the ability of a drive to read DVDs (which one engineer called 'miraculous' in itself). Less expensive dyes (recognizable by color & lustre) decay at quite variable rates. Sometimes this is on purpose (as with Mr Phelps's tape recordings).

The above is just to supplement the excellent advice already given by others.

I've not examined the source code for 'ddrescue' (which is available), but I should imagine the worst it would do is spin your drive for a shorter length of time than watching it (which is at 1x). I've never experienced any problems watching several DVDs in a row on my television.

However, I agree with everyone that a failure of the first (innermost) track to be readable on three machines is not likely a random problem; and you should try other machines and look at other factors first. (Some television recorders install copy protection when recording programs from National Geographic & other channels, which would require ripping before copying.)

Rapakiwi

PS. I do have a great heat problem writing from newer laptops, expecially those thin ones with 'bleeding edge' circuit board design. I've installed a free program that reads sensors, and set it to ring when the CPU or hard disk begins to increase its temperature rapidly. Then I shut off all other programs, screen savers, &c, and place an ice pack in a towel under the laptop before burning. When the bell rings, the ice has melted, and I substitute another. I've been able to burn for hours without a flaw at 18x in this manner.

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Last edited by Petrologist; 21-07-2009 at 22:06. Reason: fixed typo -bb