David_Dickson

ok, I am running windows XP, and have a dvd writer.
I needed to temporarily free up some space on my hard drive so I moved the contents of "my documents" onto a blank dvd. It took the computer about an hour to transfer all the data over.

Now I want to transfer everything back onto the hard-drive, but when I put the dvd in it appears almost blank. It says 16mb has been used on the disc and when I try to explore the disc none of the folders or files appear.

Is this data lost forever or can I retrieve it somehow?

please keep an explanations to words of 3 syllables or less as im not too good with computer stuff.

David_Dickson

Anyone?
this was mostly photos of cars and family and stuff. would like to get it all back.

Hanslow

Are you trying to read it in your writer or DVD-Rom? Is it the case that the disk needs closing and finalising like older CD-R drives had to do so that the disks could be read properly? Is the disk a DVD-RW or DVD-R?

Can't say for sure as I don't have a DVD writer

Also, what make/model/speed is your DVD writer? Is it a rewriter and what format does it support? -R, +R, -RW, +RW, -R and +R or -RW and +RW? What media are you using, make and speed rating?

David_Dickson

Its a + and - writer, i burnt the files to a dvd-r disc. It said it had closed the disc but appears to not have done this. How can I close the disc afterwards?

I have downloaded a data recovery program called PC Inspector which seems to be able to recover the original files from my hard-drive even though they were deleted, but its a painfully slow task, and the more I mess about with things, the more of my data is slowly overwritten

Hanslow

Dunno

I know when CD-r's have failed to finalise then I think it's basically stuffed. There might be something that can read what's on the disk and then finalise it for you writing a valid TOC but not sure what can

Probs best to have a search on google and google groups to see if it turns anything up.

stiscooby

You will probably have no luck getting any data off the DVD disk if it hasn't wrote the data to the disk properly for what ever reason.

Best bet is to use something like Easy Recovery Pro. I have used this and even tested it by doing a full format on my hard disk re-installing XP and then done a recover and it still found the data that I deleted on purpose!!!

So try that. If you have no luck with your downloaded software mail me off line its only 3Mb

StickyMicky

same thing happend to me mate with sum cdr`s

never burned properlly, deleted the data, was my own daft fault for not checking the stuffhad actualy transferd, lost a lot of **** films that day (no joke!!)

would hate to have lost lots of personal stuff

lightning101

Try a program that can do a raw data extraction. E.g. ISOBUSTER, WINIMAGE etc.

sti555

in most cases you will able to recover the old data from your hdd as long as it's not been over written.
Whats OS & file system are you running??