TR Forums

Okay, this is new to me... Last week, I could not get an ISO to play in VLC on a drive. Afraid that it meant the drive was on its way out, I copied all the files onto a new, larger drive - which surprised me in and of itself, that it let me copy withut an error. On the new drive, the file plays fine.

On a different drive, my files check out fine in DVDShrink. I copy the files to the new drive, and the program won't open the files, reporting a problem with a file. To make matters worse, I seem to get the same error on other files, whether it be a Video_TS folder or ISO.

I have never seen this problem before. The only change to the system is a new 2TB Toshiba drive which is holding the contents of to bad drives. I'm running XP w/SP3. Is this hardware/software/?

ISO is just an image file. Are you talking about an actual burned disc?

Image file.

In that case, try mount the ISO to a "virtual" drive and then play like you are playing a real disc then.

Thanks for that, it made a difference. Now...why did it make a difference? Why is it only this one drive that the program chokes on when trying to open but set as a virtual, the material checks out fine?

I want to say that the blocks were 64K instead of the regular 4K, but new technology exceeds my capacity to keep up and recall. Plus, I did a quick format on it when I got it, so don't know if it's the same or not?

VLC opens and plays all the files on the drive, but DVDShrink reports an error on every ISO/Video_TS I open with it - just on the new drive.

Both VLC and DVDShrink may have subtle bugs (VLC's reliability varies from release to release, latest is not necessarily greatest. Pretty spotty quality if you were to ask me.) reading the layout related bits from within the ISO file. Or, the ISO mounting program ignores some of those bits and just serves up the files like as if it is run from the disc. I don't really think ISO is a good storage "archive" format. If you source is the usual MP3/MP4/AVI/MKV/etc, I will just keep those.

So this probably means you HDDs are still fine. But I would not count on these programs to tell me the health of the drives. Use a proper tool like HDTune or lower level disk utils (may result in drive wiping) such as manufacturer's diagnostics if you want to be sure.

Okay... I was using DVDShrink just to test if a folder opened up after copying it to a new drive, before deleting the original. I just now deleted the original and copied the copy from the new drive to the old drive and it worked! I need more free time to learn about this new problem.

Update: I couldn't open another file set this morning. I'm not sure what I did other than uncheck it for indexing, and it worked - in DVDShrink. I did the same thing to another, and it was back to the error message. Played around with it more, now it opens. I did do a search for "the parameter is incorrect" and DVDShrink and saw that there have been complaints of this nature for a while, but moreso now with 3TB drives. One part of the error I've seen others mention but I have not seen myself is "Out of memory." I've had a different 2TB drive for a while and it's worked without a problem, so at least I know it is not the pure 2TB size that is a problem.

I'm not seeing any mention of not having rights to access the files, but suspect there is something along that way's wrong. Oh well, onward thru the fog...

Finally, I will look in to HDTunes. I've also seen "Hard Disk Sentinel" mentioned. Any other software suggestions for an XP Home based machine?

Whoa... HD Sentinel is reporting another drive is near death. Thanks for the suggestion.

Sorry for the double post, but since editing/updating the last post does nothing to show that it has received an update, I would hate it if someone else did not see the excellent suggestion about Hard Drive Sentinel. While someone else has suggested the problem may be GPT related... that's new to me and I am still trying to understand it. If there is a simple solution to the problem I'm experiencing, that's great. If it means worse things to come...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table seems to suggest - if I'm understanding it correctly - that this new drive would not be able to be used as a bootable drive if I chose to use it for that purpose since I'm running 32 bit XP.

Why does opening up an ISO file in some sort of "emulation mode" (whether you are opening it in VLC or mounting it in a virtual drive, it is emulating it as a mounted disc) be related to GPT? Are you changing subject here, I am confused again.

What are in those ISO images? Seriously, just keep the original media files (MP3/MP4/AVI/MKV/WMV/whatever). Now, if they are rips of DVDs/BDs then that's a different thing, but let's not go there.

As have been said, if you suspect the drive is failing, backup, and run the manufacturer's diagnostics. DVDShrink/VLC may well have bugs that lead you to believe that the drive has failed.