This week's ubergeeky question (comic books AND computers!)

May 27, 2011 5:10 PM

I recently received a gift of "44 Years of the Fantastic Four," which I think has one heck of a lot of PDFs of old comic books on a DVD-ROM. Regrettably, my computer cannot read it and thinks it's a blank disk. I am running Vista and Adobe X. Am I out of luck because my setup is just too modern? I wouldn't mind shooting a bunch of these over to my ipad, but obviously won't be able to do that unless my Dell can actually read the damn thing. How will I be able to relive the day that Galactus walked the earth?
posted by Mr. Justice to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Are any of the files showing up in Windows Explorer? Can you try the disc on another computer?
posted by hnnrs at 5:15 PM on May 27, 2011

This Amazon reviewer said he had to boot his computer with the disc in the drive to get it to work.

In any case, IsoBuster can extract files from otherwise unreadable optical media. Maybe give the trial of that a shot.
posted by zsazsa at 5:20 PM on May 27, 2011

Best answer: Another idea is you can try running ImgBurn (freeware) and just go to Mode > Read and tell us what it says under "File Sys", as this could clue us in to any unexpected file structure that this disc may have been authored in. For XP users, UDF 2.50 has long been a source of mysterious disc errors, for example, and though Vista should clear that up, there's no telling what other format the author might have encoded that disc in.
posted by crapmatic at 6:51 PM on May 27, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks all. ImgBurn opened the disk beautifully. I am now prepared to receive very strange looks from my seatmates while flying across the country. (Hey, if you don't like what's on my ipad, maybe you shouldn't be reading over my shoulder.)
posted by Mr. Justice at 8:50 PM on May 27, 2011