Minidisk full of video is being shown as empty?

[Jak_1]

Hey, about 10 years ago my parents fell in to the minidisk trap and bought a camcorder that records to mini disk. After digging through the atic we came across these disks after a good 10 odd years. We know the disks were full of video, as we used to watch them back on the camcorder and each disk is labeled with their content. Yesterday we tried to play the videos on the camcorder, but kept getting a 'no disk' message. I tried putting the disks into my PC's disk drive, but according to windows they are all empty (their capacity is 1.4GB and windows is displaying that 1.38GB of 1.38GB is free) .
Anyone know what could have happened? Could these disks have formatted themselves? Or could they have been written in a older format that windows may not be able to read?
Any help would be appreciated as these are the only videos we have of my brother when he was young (We actually bought the camera to record his first few years)
Thanks, Jak

The drive is a Toshiba Samsung TS-h653
The disk is a Sony DVD-R
Windows 7 Home premium x64

 

[The Paladin]

10 years in an attic.. if your attic is like mine, its cold in winter and hot in summer, its hard on data.
I would of expected getting corrupted video files, but you seems to say the dvr cam and pc driver both agree the disk are empty.
if there was any data written to a DVD-R disk you cannot reformat them, (only DVD-RW can do that).

Which leads me to believe one of two things happened;

1) as My parents, they did not understand how to record, and never checked after recording their first video,
thus kept blanks while making cases.

2) someone in your family decided to swap all recorded DVD-R disks with blank ones leaving the cases, removing some secret no one will never see

I vote #1, my parents have done this, as well as my father in law.

 

[Jak_1]

10 years in an attic.. if your attic is like mine, its cold in winter and hot in summer, its hard on data.
I would of expected getting corrupted video files, but you seems to say the dvr cam and pc driver both agree the disk are empty.
if there was any data written to a DVD-R disk you cannot reformat them, (only DVD-RW can do that).

Which leads me to believe one of two things happened;

1) as My parents, they did not understand how to record, and never checked after recording their first video,
thus kept blanks while making cases.

2) someone in your family decided to swap all recorded DVD-R disks with blank ones leaving the cases, removing some secret no one will never see

I vote #1, my parents have done this, as well as my father in law.

Thanks for the reply, but I highly doubt its option 1 as we have watched back through the videos a few years ago as for 2 .. We I just dont think that would have happened