I've owned the Panasonic DMR-E85H since January and am now having problems finalizing my DVDs. I must have finalized about 50+ on various brands from Panasonic, CompuUSA, Sony, and Verbatim since I've owned it. Also, I tend to do mostly Flex Recording (FR) and High Speed. My DVD-R HD normally is about 75% full when burning. For some reason, I can't finalize discs anymore. The machine starts to, them says finalizing failed with no further explanation. It doesn't matter how large the file is that I am recording to. Please help!
If the unit is still under warranty then take it to a service center, otherwise, the units lens may be really dirty; not with just dust, but with solid deposits that require a manual cleaning with a Q-tip and cleaner. One of my recorders requires constant cleaning but afterwards always works fine again.
I appreciate the advice and will try the cleaning and the machine is still under warranty. I have recently been able to get some discs to finalize. It seems purely random. Sometimes I have 4 hrs of content that I've burned using FR and it can finalize just fine. Other times, there's just a 1 hr show I'm trying to finalize and the player just quits on me and goes into self check mode. I don't get any U99 codes or anything, just finalizing failed or "there was an error, or replace the disk".
1. Don't assume that because it didn't finalize, it's unreadable. There is a program called ISOBUSTER for the PC that can read an unfinalized disk. 2. You don't have to finalize a disk in the same machine it was dubbed in. Another E85 or an EH50 could finalize it. 3. Are you using new media and did you do the firmware upgrade ? 4. What happens if you try to finalize the same failed disk twice ?
thanks for the ISO buster tip. I'll look into it. To answer your other question, I have experimented with putting back in the DVD to try and finalize again. I've got about 10 DVDs I've tried and have a 30% success rate at getting the DVD to finalize. The other times, the whole machine just turns off, resets, and goes into self start mode. What I have noticed is that the DVDs that I tried to finalize again have a single one hour TV show on them and the other 70% that failed have two hours or more.
