Attempted Recovery from DVDs

My hard drive was accidentally erased and was sent to a recovery specialist. I had made backup DVDs earlier - or so I thought. The problems is that when I run the recover wizard on the DVDs and click drive D, nothing happens and the next button is grayed out - all nine DVDs the same thing. Opening the DVDs in explorer show no files, free space zero bytes and total size zero bytes. I tried reading the DVDs on another PC, same thing. The DVD's were created with ATIH 9 and on a different hard drive than the one I'm using now and I'm attempting recovery with ATIH 10. Before I totally give up on the
DVDs I thought you all might know something else I can try, thanks.

 

If there is nothing on the dvds, then it is too late for you, but for others reading, when you make a backup you absolutely have to test them by doing an actual restore to a spare drive and make sure the restored drive will boot just like the original.

 

Some time ago i did make Backup on DVD. TI is storing one big file on each DVD, and this is in UDF format, not the normal ISO-format.
I have 2 DVD-drives in my machine, one is able to read UDF and i can see the file, the other one not. Looks exactly like what you are explaining.
So maybe you are using a different DVD-drive, which is not compatible to that.... maybe the other one you did check is also not compatible.
Try to read the DVDs on a quiet new drive which can handle UDF.
Good luck !

 

The burner that made the DVDs is the same one that can't read them but because of what Noplayback said, I did some UDF research and found out that trying to read the DVDs with a different version of windows than the one they were created on may be the problem plus I found some other UDF related causes, Thanks for the help.

 

If anyone finds themselves in the situation I’m in, I found software from DiskInternals that can read UDF and even recover files so that they’re readable by Acronis but since I had entire volumes missing, recovery in my situation is impossible. I learned my lesson – verify, verify verify.

 

Unfortunately, with True Image, even a good verify is no proof the Image can be Recovered successfully - as some users have found out too late, to their dismay. You absolutely must do an actual restore to a spare hard drive, at least for your first time at making an Image, to be sure of success with a restore.

 

DwnNdrty has it correct but if you don't want to try an install on a spare HD then verify but make sure you use the rescue CD version of TI to do the validate - not Windows.

The rescue CD version provides a Linux environment with a Linux version of TI and Linux drivers for your PC. They are not the same as Windows obviously and may not handle your hardware properly. Thus a Windows validation is only an indicator that TI can properly read your archive in Windows not Linux.

Even if you start your restore in Windows, it will reboot if the active partition is being restored and the Linux environment is loaded and used for the restore.

IMO, after you have confidence the Linux version works with your PC then you can use Windows to do the validate which is faster.

Validating the archive with the TI rescue CD increases the liklihood that it will restore OK but like DwnNdrty said there is only one way to be sure.