RW DVD not working

[krtxmrtz]

I have this RW DVD that I've had one year already and have burned and erased a few times. It turns out it is not recognized now by the burning software as being RW, as if it were R only and already contained data.

Maybe the disc is damaged or perhaps the driver needs some cleaning or something. How can I be 100% sure of either possibility?

[Hack]

Can you take what is on the DVD and write it your hard drive?

[krtxmrtz]

Can you take what is on the DVD and write it your hard drive?

No, it appears to be empty. On the other hand I just tried the burning software on a different RW DVD and it worked no problem.

[schoolbusdriver]

I've fallen foul of this problem in the past. A RW disc can become unreadable when its TOC gets damaged or can't be read through scratches or fingerprints. Some software such as ISOBuster can manage to read discs where others fail. I know it sounds obvious, but try running a cleaning disc in the drive too - it might be just enough to get the data off the disc.

IMO and experience, these disc "repairers" that supposedly re-polish discs are a waste of time - they usually do even more damage.

These days I just use -/+R discs, and bin them as necessary. The only RW discs I use are in a dedicated (TV etc) DVD recorder.

[Lord Orwell]

i 2nd that. Plus for a disk to be r/w you usually have to run an extra driver to support that such as INCD.