Can I tell from the demo if CnW Recovery software will recover my camcorder DVD

This is a very good question, and one that is often asked. Before committing to software licence one wants to know that it will work.

Most camcorder disks fail due to not being finalised. There are several test that may be done with CnW software to obtain a very high level of confidence that recovery will be possible. The biggest area that can cause problems is the compatibility and capability of the DVD reader on the PC that is being used. The following tests should be tried

1. Run the program with the wizard. For a disk that will work it will detect a video disk, or corrupt video disk and often will enable the One Step function on the analyse screen. There is a very high level of confidence that the disk will work
2. Go to the Main Menu and select View sector. This allows the user to view different sector numbers. For a failed video disk, the start of the disk is normally unreadabale, and will be displayed as 5A 5A 5A on the screen. To test if the disk can be read, sectors should be tried away from the start of the disk, possible values could be 1000, 10000, 50,000. The top value sector you may expect for full disk will be about 700,000, but if for a video with only 15 mins records, the highest sector to be read may be about 300,000. If data can be seen, then there is a good chance of recovery. If every sector is shown as 5A 5A, then recovery will not be possible
3. If the above two tests fail, try a different DVD drive, or a different computer

If the disk is a DVD-RW that has been quick erased, then CnW Recovery can recover such disks, but it has to be done in the UK office. Such a disk may read the first few thousand sectors, but the majority of the disk will be blank.