UDF Recovery?

[slavestate]

Okay gotta big problem here.. At work Im on a PC running Vista all day yada yada.. So when burning archives of stuff Im taking home to my Mac, I used to use the UDF DVD-Rom format in Nero to keep it safe.. Little did I know that burning em as a Windows disk wouldve been much easier.

Now I get my disks home, everytime Im browsing a UDF volume after who knows how many minutes all of a sudden, say I go to click on a PDF file on the disk, the file disappears. Mac gives me a message file cant be found.. Click on another one same thing.. Happens until I eject the disk and put it back in, then its fine again for awhile til this repeats..

Ok cool, figured Mac has some issues reading UDF volumes but they work (or at least did)..

Now come this weekend. I decided to start cataloging some of my archives on the Mac using DiskTracker..

About half of my discs now, just get spit out and wont even be read.. Thinking I screwed up something with my burner (its a modified Pioneer DVR-111) did some running around troubleshooting to no avail. These discs, which worked just fine when I brought them home my Mac now refuses to even acknowledge.

So I bring a stack into work today.. The one disc I have that the contents still show up in, refuses to let me copy data from it.

The rest are just not being recognized by Windows Vista at all. Not by Nero, not by Alcohol, not by AShampoo, nothing. Downloaded ISOBuster, and basically its been trying to recover and/or extract the files from this disc that actually still can be read ALL DAY now.

Now I dont get it. I know theres problems with the UDF format and whatnot.. But these discs all burned fine, and worked fine just a couple months ago!

Can anyone recommend ANYTHING to try to recover the files from these?? So far aside from ISOBuster, Ive tried the CDTrack Rescue Demo, and InDisc Recover (looks to me like theyre the same app just one ripping off the other??) to no avail.. Nero when I try to read disc info just tells me its not there.. CDTrack and InDisc both just tell me "Device Is Not Ready".. Is there ANYTHING I can do whatsoever to try and recover these??

I basically just want my files off so I can reburn em all to a regular old Windows format DVD..

Not ever messing with this UDF crap AGAIN! And I thought UDF DVD-Roms were supposed to be the most generic compatible format?

[cluberti]

Can the discs be read in another machine entirely? It seems odd that both your Mac and your PC are having trouble reading discs (format shouldn't matter if it's supported by both, as UDF should be) - so what is in common amongst these discs you've burned? It certainly isn't the OS, so is it the application used to burn the discs? Is it the drive on the machine burning the discs?

[slavestate]

Well they were all burned on my PC at work so that would be running Vista and Nero 7 Micro, the burner is a Pioneer DVR-111D (now flashed to a 111L).. I have the exact same burner in my Mac at home, in fact I bought a bunch in bulk at work and ordered mine seperately that same time.

The burner at home isnt flashed to the 111L firmware but I actually just did that on the PC on monday, and the disks werent working in the mac this weekend beforehand.

The oddest part is they all used to work just fine both here and at home on my Mac..

Ive noticed while playing with ISOBuster and trying to either read or extract the files, the sectors that its coming up with as unreadable are not consistent from one time to the next.. This is really leading me to believe that somehow I CAN save these but ISOBuster is getting tedious.

Most of the time when it hits an unread sector I can tell it to retry a couple times and it appears its working. However once again Ive been doing it since 7:30 this morning and Im only at 6% of the disk, and Im having to hit retry every couple of minutes repeatedly.

Im installing an Ubuntu box at work right now to see if this will work. Gonna try out dd_rescue and see if that helps as well.

[cluberti]

You might also want to see what happens in a different machine with a different drive, too - if it follows the discs, you likely have a problem with those - especially if you can make a disc elsewhere to see if it works fine on other machines and whether or not it works on your Vista and/or Mac boxes, which would be another good test.

[Innocent Devil]

to be on safe always keep mirror ISO and Joliet structures along with UDF

(ie select ISO/UDF type in Nero) unless u r having verry big files >2GB

Also check the UDF fs version some new UDF versions cannot be read by OLD Oses.

i dunno abt mac OS support or not the UDF 2.5 but sure it cant be read in XP