Is data recovery from a corrupt CD possible?

[danPowell]

Hey all,
I made the mistake of saving important photos to a cd, and didn't do a verify to make sure it was all good before I deleted them from the hd. I defragged etc. and so undelete is unable to bring them back from the HD.
So, I have a cd that the drive tries repeatedly to read for probably 20 minutes. It doesn't show up on the drive list as being recognized.
Now I have subsequently used DVD Data Rescue, by Naltech, and it has managed to find a bunch of photos, but I get file size errors when I try to preview them.

So the way this is a question appropriate to the forum is:
a) do you have advice on how I can get these damn photos back?
b) can you explain how the files can be found, and show the appropriate information in the recovery software, and still be too corrupt to show me the photo?

I really don't need any coasters. I'd prefer the photos.
Thanks in advance.

 

[gavilan]

Is the disc scratched or otherwise physically damaged? Have you tried reading it in a different drive?

 

[danPowell]

Sadly, yes.

It doesn't appeared terribly scratched. There what looks like a very light scratch about halfway away from the centre.
It's one of those 'vinyl' cds.
Any way I can determine if it is affected by a scratch, as opposed to a bad file structure or similar?

 

[Nodsu]

You could try IsoBuster as an alternative program - the CD recovery functionality is free. Also, another CD drive may behave better with damaged CDs and may give you more data back.

 

[iss]

As Nodsu said ISO Buster can be used for cd recovery. also another freeware program CD Check has that feature. the ability to recover data from a damaged or corrupted CD is going to be heavily influenced by how good of a reader your optical drive is.

 

[virtual-realty]

You can recover your data either from your hard drive or CDROm by using data recovery software.
To recovery data from hard drive try Stellar Phoenix File Recovery is high-quality data recovery solution that uses powerful algorithms to recover deleted/lost files after instances ranging from accidentally formatting the hard disk .
Recently deleted files are not recovered because of severe fragmentation. This is a common problem in FAT file system drives. File recovery can discover such deleted files and folders from the temporary copies created by the application software and/or the operating system.
Can download the demo from: http://www.stellarinfo.com/file-recovery-software.htm
Demo shows you the recovered data. If you are able to see the data through demo version then save it by getting the full version.

To recover data from CDRom you can try

Stellar Phoenix CDRom Data Recovery Software. It provides file recovery when disk has physical damages : scratch, bubbles, cracks and warping.
Demo can be downloaded from: http://www.stellarinfo.com/cd-data-recovery.htm

Hope it will help you in recovering your lost files.

 

[Tedster]

if you have a program like GOBACK - even with defragging, you can recover deleted files up to a point. I won't run a computer without GOBACK. And i also back up all the time.