On Thu, Feb 02, 2017 at 06:32:13PM -0500, David J Brooks wrote: > Way back when i stored my picture files on CD's or DVD's. When i > replaced my aging PC with the current iMac i took the old HD out > bought a case and pulled files from it when needed. This drive is now > failing so i decided to put all of my CD's and DVD's on my new 1TB > external. I did the CD's first and all is going well however now that > i'm onto my DVD's all is not well in Casa Del Brooksie. I keep getting > " you have inserted a blank DVD what do you want to "???? and i get 3 > options non of which is to open files. these are definitely recorded > DVD's. > > Am i screwed.??
Not necessarily. The first thing you should probably try is to see if you can read those DVDs on a different machine - if either of your DVD drives is mis-aligned (the one you wrote DVDs on or the one you are trying to read them on) you might possibly get the behaviour you observe. It's also possible that the DVD drives used different recording systems. There were four different sub-species of DVDs; DVD-R, DVD+R, and DVD+/-RW. While most DVD drives I've seen were capable of reading all of the types, it might just be that you've somehow ended up with one that can't do that. A third reason, though, might be that the machine you used when creating was capable of reading DVDs that hadn't been 'closed' (i.e. DVDs that had some files on them, but which you could later add more files to), but the new machine (or, strictly speaking, the driver software) couldn't do that. An indication that this is the case would be if one of the choices that you are offered when you put the DVD in the drive is to 'close' or 'finalize' the disc. If that's the case, then choosing that option might suddenly make the files recorded on the disc show up. That's a risky action, though - if you do decide to try that I'd recommend only doing it for the first time on a disc you're prepared to lose; if this isn't the reason why you can't see the files then closing the session (which will write to the disc) will probably eliminate any possibility of ever being able to get at any of the files recorded on that disc. Good luck, and keep your fingers crossed! I'm going through a somewhat similar process myself, although I'm retrieving data from several old external hard drives and copying it to the 1TB internal data drive on my new system. I've run into one drive that decided it wasn't going to cooperate, but fortunately everything on that drive was replicated on another drive that was still in working order. Once I've got everything merged into one dataset the first thing I'll be doing is replicating the data onto a couple of other external drives (one 2TB, and one older 500GB). I considered getting a writable Blu-Ray setup, but for the price of a BD-R unit I could get myself another 2TB external hard drive, which is a whole lot more convenient (not to mention faster) than a stack of optical discs. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
