First post, by debs3759
- Rank
- Oldbie
I'm doing a major reorganisation, ready to set up a load of retro systems. As part of my preparation, I'm going through CD-R and CD-RW discs, salvaging any data I can from discs up to 25 years old. Some are fine, and I'm copying the to HDD ready for archival storage (M-Disc DVD+R and BD-R HTL). Some don't read at first, but after inserting several times, they can be read slowly. I've just come across the first disc in my library that seems totally unreadable. I've tried reading it with CDRoller, IsoBuster, Recovery Toolbox For CD Free, Roadkill's Unstoppable Copier and Puran File Recovery. They all rely on Windows being able to see the disc, so can't do a sector by sector recovery.
Does anyone know of any software that will be able to salvage data off discs that are degraded that badly? This disc was full of tools I used on NT4 back in the day (most can probably be found online, but not everything can be found, including old reg codes, and I still have about 100 more discs to try salvaging). It's expected that some data will never be recovered, but as I can recover data from HDDs on a sector by sector basis, I'm hoping it's also possible on optical discs. I don't mind if the only free software is a 7 day trial, I can put everything else on hold for a few days while I back up my library. If the only option is to buy an app, that's fine as well, as I have general and dev apps for every version of Windows that I will be trying to salvage. I just don't want to spend big money on an app that can't bypass normal read failures.
See my graphics card database at www.gpuzoo.com
Constantly being worked on. Feel free to message me with any corrections or details of cards you would like me to research and add.