Strange DVD Issue

Qui-Gon John · Post by **Qui-Gon John** » Mon Mar 10, 2014 4:32 pm

I have never seen anything like this, hopefully someone here can help.

I was working on someone's HP Tower and was going to upgrade them from Vista to Windows 7. My disc would not boot on their optical drive. I thought it might have been that my disc went bad. But it turns out, after much other checking, that somehow the optical drive in their computer rendered this DVD+R and another DVD+R (that had Office 2010 on it) as now they are read by any computer as being blank discs. I did not see any noticeable scratchs or any other visual sign of the damage, so I do not know how this happened. But I am sure this persons optical drive did this 2 my 2 discs.

The Office 2010 I was able to easily recover, as I had all the files on a flash drive. But not so lucky with the one really good Window 7 Home Premium 32 bit Install DVD.

Has anyone ever heard or seen anything like this?

Do you know how I might be able to recover the Windows 7 disc?

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Mon Mar 10, 2014 7:04 pm

so the PC will not boot to a dvd disc ?

my brother has a intel system with some gigabyte motherboard that does not allow booting to dvd, only cd or usb along with maybe network or something like that.

we had to make a bootable USB drive to install windows 7 to it

Qui-Gon John · Post by **Qui-Gon John** » Mon Mar 10, 2014 7:25 pm

Well that is not the issue here. This optical drive will not read a disc on booting or even in Windows. Furthermore, after attempting to boot to the Windows 7 disc or trying to read the Office 2010 disc, both discs now come up as BLANK DVD'S even when inserted into other computers, I tried several, all indicate these discs are blank, yet you can see the burned area and they are not blank and there is no obvious damage, such as scratches or dirt.

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Mon Mar 10, 2014 7:51 pm

some dvd drives have issues with burned discs IMO, does the drive read any disc ?

Qui-Gon John · Post by **Qui-Gon John** » Mon Mar 10, 2014 9:21 pm

Well I am not there any longer to see, but I don't think so. Even when I finally got Windows 7 installed, it would not read my genuine Windows 7 disc (original), I had to use an external optical drive. But I'm more concerned with how could it have affected my 2 burned disc to make them appear as if they are now blank?