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August 29, 2008 03:54pm pdt
 
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Recovering data from un-finalized DVD-RW (camcorder disc)

A friend of mine has been using a dvd camcorder recently and dropped it.  The disc it had in it was marked as full but was unfinalized.  As far as I know, the camcorder writes the video to the disc real time and only publishes it to the table of contents when the disc is finalized. There are no scratches on the disc surface, and no tears or bumps in the label side of the disc.  The camera still works and has produced several finalized DVDs since.

I put the dvd in a linux box and attempted to dd it to an iso.  At first it looked good because it was taking some time to get the data, and the drive was spinning up.  However, when the dd completed the iso file was 0 bytes.

In searching on google I found a data recovery company that services this exact problem - so I know that there is a solution to the problem.  My friend is operating on a near-zero budget so sending the disc to them is mostly out of question.  My CS degree tells me that I should be able to read the data from the disc with some special software routines....I just don't know even where to begin.

The footage on the disc is pretty important.  How can we get it off?
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Question Stats
Zone: Storage
Question Asked By: robacarp
Solution Provided By: svs
Participating Experts: 2
Solution Grade: B
Views: 0
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[+][-]Expert Comment by nobus

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[+][-]Author Comment by robacarp
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[+][-]Expert Comment by nobus

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[+][-]Accepted Solution by svs
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