Copying a DVD Which Failed to Finalize

I'm going to build on of the topic of a prior posting (Organizing DVD's), where my wife is engaged in a massive VHS to DVD transfer project. BTW, she did decide to go with the vinyl plastic sleeves to organize and store her now-converted DVDs. The sleeves are available at both Staples and Office Depot - although they're not what I would call inexpensive.

Today issue is about a failed copying effort where four separate movies were successfully copied to a DVD, but on the fifth movie - the process unexpectedly aborted, and while the prior four movies were maintained intact, the fifth one is nowhere to be found on the disk, and more significantly, now the DVD appears unwilling to be "finalized". I examined the disk and checked for any physical problems and cleaned it thoroughly, but without success.

As most of you will know, finalizing makes the DVD "transportable", and playable on any DVD player. We figured we would just circumvent this problem by retaping the DVD content back over onto a VHS tape, and starting a new DVD disk. Unfortunately, my Panasonic DVR will not recognize a DVD as being available to be copied until it has been finalized. Any other suggestions on how we can 1) force the system to finalize the DVD or 2) push the content of the DVD onto some other media, so that we can then recopy it back onto a non-damaged DVD disk?