Strange and inexplicable sudden loss of disc contents

Hello,

I hope someone out there might be able to shed some light on this issue for me. I have a Windows Vista Home Edition PC but am discovering an all too common problem occuring with DVD-R and CD-R discs that i am attempting to load. I have this DVD-R disc that has alot of media files on it and i have been able to load it without problem dozens of times before. I enter the disc, the disc is read and in My Computer the disc is displayed in the drive i use for my external disc drive (in this case E as what the discs title is and i get the automatic menu that appears whenever a disc is entered, asking how i want to open the entered disc files.

However i entered the same disc just as usual and unaltered in every way from the last time i loaded it and yet this time, my computer has decided it can't load the disc, won't display the discs title, won't open the autoplay menu function and after right clicking the drive and selecting 'explore', all i see is a drive with no files listed and the sentence 'drag any files you want to add to the disc' at the top of the opened disc. Therefore i have inexplicably lost the media files on the disc and the computers recognition of the disc aswell. When clicking on the 'properties' of the disc it is apparent files are still on the disc as the used space equals 4.30Gb and the free space is about 60-70 Mb.

This isn't the first time this has happened but i treated the last time as a one off but now it has occured again, i thought i would ask if anyone else was familiar with this event on Vista and if so, if there is a way to get the disc successfully recognisable when loaded and ultimately get the files back? Is there a reason why this does happen and what causes it?

Many many thanks for any help or advice given.

Dave
Birmingham
UK

 

Apart from physical destruction, you can't "lose" files from CD-R or DVD-R media.

Why? Because, they simply can NOT be erased. The "-R" means that once written, the media are then read-only.

The good news is that you files are ALL still there. The bad news is that the optical disk drive is encountering hardware failures that prevents it from reading the discs properly.