Linux – Recovery of damaged DVD yielding “no medium found” error

Initial Disk Quality

Since we're not talking about a hard drive here, which can be recovered, you're sadly experiencing the reality that most consumer grade DVDs are NOT reliable.

A physical hard disk has magnetic charged particles in a solid surface, and recovery in worst case scenarios happens by taking the disk apart physically, and then using a special read head to go sector by sector and reading the magnetic data. A dye based writable dvd has no such option, the dye is the data, and if it's degraded, there is nothing to recover.

The only likely prospect given your scenario is that the dye used to create DVD-R disk data simply is failing. Unlike commercial music CDs, which usually use a sort of laser enscribed aluminum sheet for the actual data, burnable dvds use a layer of dye, which, and this is particularly relevant with lower end stuff, tends to fade away and fail over years.

Note that 'cheaper' does not necessarily refer to price or brand, it refers to the factory that actually made the disks. Some major brands that people would have believed were high quality were not in fact high quality.

This is also, by the way, why you always have to buy name DVDs, like Taiyo Yuden (back when I did a lot of burning, that's the only brand I would use), or quality 'archival' dvds [which cost a LOT more than regular ones]. Cheaper dvds/cds use cheaper dyes, which can and do simply fail over time. The only brand I ever trusted was taiyo yuden, because it never outsourced its disk production and was known to be be high quality, and was made in Japan [this could have changed since I did a lot of work with CDs/DVDs]. If the disk was made by a no name or whitebox brand, then it's junk, for sure. I've seen dyes on CDs fade after just a few years when they were cheap no name brands.

You may have heard the term 'archival DVDs', this is what it refers to, the expected life of a properly stored optical storage medium.

Since you did not mention the brand of the disk, that suggests to me that you were not aware of these realities, since the key to all optical disk storage is the quality of the disk and its dyes, and that's a function of what brand and model version it is.

It's also worth mentioning that rewritable CD/DVDs are far far worse, and should in no case be relied on for really anything at all, at least that's been my experience, over years, I think the data loss become so high that I no longer even consider optical rewritable anything to be a storage medium at all.

How to Kill your DVD/CD

Things that can damage these dyes: heat, probably number one, like, putting disk on or near radiators, electronic components that generate heat, direct sunlight, etc.

Once you have damaged the dye there is no longer any data there to restore, and if you damaged the actual data table on the dvd itself that says where the data is, then there is nothing to restore either.

Other good ways to lose your data is to buy cheap or no name disks, that means you will wake up one day and find your data gone, without having to do a thing!! Just from the dye failing on its own, though I'm sure environmental causes can contribute, like the place it's stored getting a bit warmer for a few days in a row, or whatever.

Last Chances

Before you give up, you might want to try the following:

• Take a clean soft cloth, dampen it slightly, and carefully wash the surface of the disk. In particular pay close attention to the inner, not outer part. The disks burn from the inside out, so if there is dirt or scratches there, it can make the reads fail.

• Try it in a very high quality DVD reader, like a plextor, something with a very good laser. Lasers can and do wear out, and, coupled with dye fade and failure, that can make disks fail to read. Do not assume a DVD reader laser is in good condition, they die over the life the reader, so the newer it is, the better. As with dyes, there is a significant difference between the quality of the lasers used by CD/DVD readers/writers. The laser is what heated the dye when it was burned, and it's what tries to read it when it reads. The better the laser, the more likely it can pick up faint traces of fading dyes.

• take a magnifier and closely examine the disk under strong light close to the inside rings, to see if you can see anything unusual there, like cloudy surface, or something like that. This is what it has to read to discover that there is a disk with data present.

• laptop dvd drives are junk, cheap, low end, flimsy, lightweight, I wouldn't even consider them to be a valid test, make sure to use a real PC dvd reader, that is not too used or old, or cheap.

• The device you listed: http://www.driverscape.com/download/tsstcorp-cddvdw-sh-s223c-ata-device appears to be over 10 years old, is that correct? If so, that's clearly not going to be a good tool to test this with.

Back in the old days, you could actually rely on the fact that certain brands and models had superior lasers, but in my opinion, those days are sadly gone. But if you research it, you may find that there are still certain specific models that are known to have a superior laser, obviously, I would expect those to be higher end and expensive.

Note that the age of the reader is also important, because these lasers basically begin to die as soon as they are used, so the newer the high end reader is, the higher your chances at recovery.

However, with that said, the marked decline in reading over a short time suggests to me that something started breaking down the DVD dyes, until it failed, possibly an inadvertent leaving it in direct sun or on a hot surface, without you having realized it, or simply the dye itself breaking down because it was either cheap or defective in the first place.

Likewise the drives not finding any data suggests the file system data table in the start of the dvd is either gone or corrupted beyond repair or read.

[Update: user data added to post]

As I suspected, you used no name dvd blanks, which are basically guaranteed to be non trustworthy, and your dvd readers are old. Old burners by the way can also have weaker lasers, which makes the dye imprint weaker, so it looks like you're suffering from all the worst case scenarios.

Where to get good disks?

I haven't bought these in a while, but to make this complete, I searched, and was very happy to find that supermediastore.com still exists, and still sells Taiyo Yuden. https://www.supermediastore.com/products/jvc-taiyo-yuden-dvd-r-8x-silver-thermal-dvd-recordable-single-layer-media-jdmr-zz-sb8-100pk

This was the best place to buy 10-15 years ago, and it appears to still be around, which is great, I always trusted that store and their products, which is an unusual thing to be able to say nowadays.

Note that other good archival options are things like Verbatim DataLifePlus, but in general, I only stick with brands where I know that the brand is actually made by the company whose brand the disks carry.

But the key thing to remember is: if the data on the disk is important, PAY FOR QUALITY DISKS!!