CD/DVD data recovery software

[SailingNut]

Can anyone recomment a good (and hopefully free) CD/DVD sata recovery program?

My nephew gave me a CD of photos that is un readable and he's asked me to try to recover it.

The drive loads and when I check the propertires, there is about 640MB used, so it looks like the pictures should be there but the drive does not show any files.

I'm thinking that maybe the disk didn't finalize or something.

So, I need a tool that I can inspect the drive at a lower level and see what's going on.

Thanks in advance!

 

[A Guy]

I would try Recuva first. It's free, by the makers of CCleaner. Try it here:

Recuva

A Guy

 

[Ponmayilal]

You may also try IsoBuster. Download from here.

 

[LiquidSnak]

Is the disk scratched to heck and back? Or is it just an as yet unreadable disk?

 

[SailingNut]

Is the disk scratched to heck and back? Or is it just an as yet unreadable disk?

The disk isn't scratched. I think something went wrong in the burning process.

 

[SledgeDG]

Perhaps it's a Multitrack disc and your Nephew forgot to close the disc (i.e. finalize it) but that option should come up if you pop that disc into a burner.
Others than that, Recuva should be your best bet.

Good Luck

-DG

 

[Ponmayilal]

....Others than that, Recuva should be your best bet...... -DG

I had had no occasion to go looking for a recovery software either for recovery from a hard disk or optical media.

But I have played around with Isobuster - which is a CD, DVD, BD/HDDVD specific recovery software - and extracted bits and pieces just as a trial.

The free version is limited to CDs and DVDs while the paid licenced pro version unlocks its BD/HDDVD capabilities. It bypasses Windows and reads the optical media with its own engine because of which it is capable of reading even those optical media which Windows gives up. I understand that many people had successfully retrieved valuable photos and home videos which otherwise were lost.

So SailingNut can try both Recuva and Isobuster and let us know the results. We shall then have a first person report here, that may be useful to others in the same predicament.

 

[SailingNut]

As an update, I tried Recuva and it crashed when trying to open the CD.

I got IsoBuster and have been running it to extract the disc to a file. It's been running, but EXTREMELY slowly. It's been trying to sxtract the image for nearly 24 hours and it's only 85% done. I checked the files it's creating and they are not growing to an insane size. (Actually way smaller than I would have expected at this point.) So, I'm going to let it keep on running and see how it works out.

Thanks for all of the suggestions!

 

[SailingNut]

So ISO Buster finally finished extracting the CD and there were only a few files that it showed. Also, it won't let me extract any of them without paying for the product. :-(

I also reported incorrectly on Recuva. It runs fine, but will not let me select the CD drive. It will only scan HDs and flash drives.

Any other suggestions?

 

[Ponmayilal]

I rechecked with IsoBuster. It now says that recovery from UDF CDs (written with packet-writing ) requires the pro version. Did your friend write it with UDF?

As far as I know, IsoBuster is the first and last best thing for CD, DVD recovery. If it cannot do, the disk is beyond redemption.

But from what you have reported, it did show some files after reading or scanning the CD (that is not called extracting) for more than 24 hours but refused to extract it without a licence. Bad luck.

Only yesterday when I ran Partition Wizard from my multiboot USB pendrive, somewhere it said try our free CD DVD data recovery software. ( I fail to remember the name). So dig the Partition Wizard website and you may find that. Good luck.

EDIT: It is Power Data Recovery Free Edition. See it here .