CD Recovery FAQ

First of all, these are some suggestions and hints based on my experience in recovering 100s of CDs. I am no expert, I am no brilliant master of recovery. There are a lot of people with more experience or talent.

Signs of a bad disc

· It takes about 20 minutes to copy the contents of a CD onto the hard drive.

· The ‘Time to completion’ estimate keeps changing going up to 114, then down to 32, then up again, when there are no other programs accessing memory.

· The file fails to copy across to your hard drive.

· The CD frequently has errors reading the data from the CD.

· The CD has spots/scratches on the back of the CD.

· It has the words ‘Datastream’ or ‘Mr Data’ on them. (hehe)

Ok, the cd ain’t doing what it is supposed to. So follow the following steps to retrieve the data.

First, CLEAN THE DISC! Wipe it clean with tissues. If the stain ain’t coming off, get a damp cloth and use that. Don’t be afraid to get the surface a little wet as long as you clean the disc and get all the water off.

If that doesn’t let you copy the data off…

Second, ISOBUSTER! Get the program from here. This program is the free pre-commercial release.  Use this program to extract the data from the cd. It uses raw mode to help extract the data from the cd. If it encounters errors in recovering the cd, you can attempt to just ignore the errors and keep going which means some of the file will have corrupt data, but the other 99% of the file will be ok. You can change between viewing files to ISO if the normal viewing method fails. I had one CD that was so badly messed up that I had to use the ISO view to even see the files to extract them because the index of the cd was messed up. This program should solve 95% of your problems

Third, TRY OTHER CD-ROM DRIVES! You must know some people with computers. Does the CD work in their drives? You could at least try! Some CDs go better with some CD-ROM drives.

Fourth, NERO RAW MODE! Attempt to copy the CD to another CD. Don’t select on the fly, make sure it goes to the hard drive. Tell Nero to copy the CD to another CD, and tell it to read in Raw mode and to correct data. This will take a while so go to sleep / watch TV while its happening. Hopefully Nero will take its time reading the CD in raw mode to grab the raw data and use it to generate a perfectly working CD.

Fifth, for movies, VIRTUALDUB DIRECT STREAM METHOD! Not very reliable, but if you change some settings in Virtual Dub and tell the program to extract your request to another location on a direct stream copy, the program is supposed to copy the show off the CD by streaming the data and audio off. I haven’t seen it work yet since VirtualDub will check the stream for integrity and ISObuster is much better.

Sixth, SMART PEOPLE RECOVERY SOLUTION. Get an mIRC version before 5.9, get on an IRC server and then send the file to your own nick. The file will then transfer, and stop at the brown spot. Stop the transfer when you have gone as far as you can. Find a source on the net with the same file. Find the same file on the net, and then use your download program to "resume" downloading from where your file stopped downloading using as much of the file from IRC as possible. This can be by IRC, or you can use Getright as well to resume the download.

Last, see if another trader has it, cause its too hard to recover……….

Check my divx recovery faq if you want to save / watch what you have been able to recover, even if it still has errors.

Note – This is my FAQ and if you want to use it somewhere else, ASK me first. I may or may not grant permission but if I do, you will credit me. If you find it anywhere else, please email me.