Hey there,
Thanks to 2 of my DVDs malfunctioning on me (
Memorex -RWs as I mentioned in this thread), I had some experience with trying to recover data (videos/photos) from the DVDs in my DCR-DVD403, and I thought I could share them for community benefit.
First a
disclaimer though: There are just too many kinds of disc corruption/failure, and there can not be a one-size-fits-all solution to recover data. So I can't guarantee that the tips below will be useful in
your case. Actually, I guarantee they won't be useful for some of the corruptions/failures out there!?
I'm in no way affiliated with the programs I recommend below other than being a user of them. I, of course, wouldn't knowingly recommend anything that could be harmful to your recovery process, but,
please follow these tips at your own risk.
In my case, my 403 was giving me the dreaded "C:13:02" error for one of the DVDs (-RW Video mode). On that disc, one of the clips were not shown at all on the index screen of Handycam's player mode, and the one before that was shown with a question mark. None of the 20+ photos were shown either.
On the other (-RW VR mode) the clips were skipping in the middle to the next one, etc.
As suspected, Picture Package (PP) was almost totally useless with the problematic clips. It would try to copy over the clip upto a certain percentage (not even to 1% sometimes though), and just give up (when it runs into a bad sector/scratch/reading error) (Not giving a single error message let alone an option!?!
). It then deletes the transferred part of the MPG from the disk. So, let me start with a couple of
tips on Picture Package:- This is probably obvious, but doesn't hurt to remind: Don't try to transfer all your clips at once (by checking/selecting them all together). Say, you selected the first 4, and the 3rd one has problems. Even if the first 2 are transferred correctly, they get deleted when the transfer of the 3rd one fails.
- Trying to get a copy before PP deletes the transferred portion: Say you're trying to recover a minute long clip, and the part that's most important to you is in the first half. If, picture package freezes for a second or two around 60%, and gives up, you can then:
- Open the destination folder in windows explorer.
- Start the transfer ("Copy to hard disk") by selecting only the problematic clip
- Select the mpg file as soon as it appears on the folder, press Ctrl-C (Copy).
- When PP comes to 60% (or whatever number it freezes and cancels out for your clip), and looks like it's going to fail again, press Ctrl-V (Paste).
This way you can end up sneaking around ~36 seconds of the clip, before PP deletes it! 
There were some other posts here recommending ISOBuster for recovery. I haven't had much chance with it, and ended up looking for alternatives. Following paragraphs explain the 2 programs I found useful:
PhotoRec (Freeware from CGSecurity.org):- PhotoRec would list your drives using their low level names such as "/dev/sdb". The one that shows a capacity of "1466 MB / xxxx MiB" should be the DVD in your Sony Handycam. Select it, and "Proceed".
- I've used "[Intel]" partition in the next screen.
- It'll list the "partition" information on the next screen. Select "[Options]" in there. I've changed "Keep corrupted files" to "Yes", but it may not give back much. Change "Mode expert" to "Yes".
- Select "[Search]".
- You'll be asked for "filesystem type", choose, "[Other]".
- Using up/down arrow keys, select a directory to save recovered files, and press "Y".
- After the first pass (#0) (because you selected "expert" mode above), you'll be asked for a block size. Select 2048.
- Second pass (#1) will start, and hopefully, you'll see a line like "jpg: xx recoverd / mpg: xx recovered" as it proceeds. (Note that, number of clips, and mpg's may not always match. Sometimes multiple clips can be merged into single mpg files).
- The program will try to read your disk as much as it can, saving files into the directory you selected.
- Make sure you have plenty (and I mean plenty) charge on your battery, or better yet, connect your handycam to the AC adapter, because depending on the number of read failures, these passes will take a long time.
Once it finishes, hopefully you'll have some jpgs, and mpgs in the folder you selected as target folder.
If PhotoRec was able to recover something, as you had "bad(unreadable) sectors" (i.e. garbage data) within your photo/video binary data, they most probably won't be showing up smoothly in your players/editors. Even their duration could be messed up (too long, or too short).
Assuming you were able to salvage something in the steps above, you can move into trying to fix your videos so that, they play better:
VideoReDo (Shareware from VideoReDo.com):
A very simple/straightforward QuickStreamFix feature of this program brings the MPG to a much-more compliant form so it can ben played/edited in other programs without much pain (
It will drop some "frames" but, considering you'd be able to salvage some of your footage, you shouldn't be complaining! ). Rather than trying to explain the usage, let me just point you to other sources which has already done that:
Speedy, and (close to) full recovery to all of you frustrated souls out there! Hope these help some of you!
Ozgur