DVD-9 Hazards

[Mr Edge]

Hello, I'm new here and for my first post I thought I'd provide some potentially useful information I've discovered.

Summary: Apparently some DVD drives cannot correctly read DL DVDs.

I've been dumping my PS2 collection recently and I was having trouble figuring out why my DL games were failing redump-org checks. I tried both ImageBurn and IsoBuster, but the resulting images were smaller (often by hundreds of MBs) than redump-org said they should be. Both programs worked fine with no warnings that anything was amiss, and I'd never had a problem with SL DVDs.

Eventually I hooked up another drive from the pile to my USB adapter and was able to successfully dump my DL games.

The moral of the story: always verify your images against redump-org, especially for DVD-9 games.

One more thing I discovered: most programs cannot see or extract the files on the second layer, including IsoBuster, redump-org's preferred program (which I don't get, frankly--it's a good program and I've used it for years, but it doesn't strike me as designed for this sort of thing).

Initially I thought maybe the extra space I was missing was unused, so I wanted to see what was on the second layer. The only way I was able to do this was to find the second layer using a hex editor, then split it at the layerbreak. The resulting file was then able to be read as a normal DVD ISO file. (And yes, there was data that my bad drive was silently missing at the end of the second layer.)

That's all for tonight. I hope you found this interesting/useful.