LG DVD Bluebirds

One annoying surprise I had when assembling my new PC came from where I least expected it: the LG CD/DVD drive.

Little did I know that this unsuspecting GH22NS50 DVD-RW from LG was soon to become a little bugger!

Right from the start I began experiencing some weird Bluebirds content in that drive, whenever the drive was empty.

After some googling around, I found that this particular LG GH22NS50 model has some programs in its firmware, and it "mounts" that image whenever the drive is empty! Unbelievable!

Annoying, but easily fixable: you'll just need to update its firmware to a bluebird-less version!

And I hope that's the last of these experiments coming from LG or any other drive manufacturer.

DVDisaster - Recover Data from Damaged DVDs

How many of you store your holiday and family photos and movies on DVDs?
My guess is: a lot of you.

Well, it's no secret DVDs can begin to show reading errors after some years... and how would you like - 10 or 15 years from now - to try and get some photos from some old DVDs just to find out there were a lot of them you couldn't read?

That's why I'm writing to tell you about DVDisaster.

DVDisaster is an error recovery program that can work in different ways:

For the most "paranoid" of you, wanting to keep all your CD/DVDs as safe as possible, it allows you to create error recovery ECC partity files for your existing "good" DVDs. If those DVDs happen to get some bad sectors in the futures, this smaller ECC file will be used to recreate the missing data.
(Keep in mind it wouldn't allow yo to recover a totally damaged DVD - for that you'd still need a full backup - but it will suffice for the more likely "bad sector" errors.)

On the other hand, most likely you'll experience a DVD error from a disc you haven't made an ECC file.
In this case, DVDisaster will copy all the good sectors, and then try to grab as much data as possible from the bad sector by doing multiple readings. It's a lot less likely to recover usable data (you really should have created that ECC file while you had the chance) but... maybe you'll get lucky.

DVDisaster is completely free and available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Double-Layer DVDs affect Wii

The latest game for Nintendo Wii: Super Smash Brothers Brawl is the first to use double-layer discs, and it's causing a lot of problems. Multiple reports of people experiencing lots of disc read errors have been complaining about it.

Now Nintendo has stated that these problems are probably due to dust build up on the DVD drive lens, as the double layer DVD requires more "sensitivity" to be read.
Drives that can read single-layer DVDs may fail when trying to read these DL DVDs.

The introduction of Dual-Layer DVDs seems to have been dictated by "copy-protection" reasons alone - as it's doubtful that such a game would require more than the disc space provided by single layer DVDs.
If that's so, lots of people will have problems when they buy this game, problems that would be avoided if they used a single layer DVD.
"Pirates" on the other hand, will continue to copy these games as usual, with reports of hackers already stripping the dummy data and placing the entire game in a single layer disc.