Data Recovery from a CD

[D_R]

Hey Guys,

what do I need to recover Data from an Audio CD? I don't have the CD in my hands yet, but as the guy told me, there is no obvious physical damage. The CD is just old. The CD is not self recorded, it's pressed (silver data side). And as far as I understand, there is no (cheap - next price is about 1k€) way, to get another copy.

Current state is, that a PC with a DVD-R Drive or a normal CD player does not recognize the Disk at all.

[dick]

Hi. I have always used this app, with various results. https://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/
Sometimes you have to try several drives until the utility can see the disk.

[LarrySabo]

You might try IsoBuster: https://www.isobuster.com/

[maximus]

I think the fact that it an audio CD rules out most recovery software. It can't just be copied, it has to be ripped, and I doubt there are any ripping programs out there to handle bad disks. I think the best chance will come from trying multiple drives to see if one can read it.

If there is physical damage (scratch) that is causing the issue, then you can perform a certain level of physical repair, depending on how severe.

[D_R]

I think the fact that it an audio CD rules out most recovery software. It can't just be copied, it has to be ripped, and I doubt there are any ripping programs out there to handle bad disks. I think the best chance will come from trying multiple drives to see if one can read it.

I think, the first problem is, that most modern drives do not just play back the data / music of the CD. They try to read the data. To cache it or to do some kind of magic, error correction or something else. On my opinion, I just need the simplest drive, I can get. Or some kind of drive for DR, where I can control, what the drive is doing. Or I have to make my own drive. CDs are around for about 40 years. How hard could it be to use modern Boards to create an own drive that is doing what I want? - And yes, I know, I will regret this sentence

If there is physical damage (scratch) that is causing the issue, then you can perform a certain level of physical repair, depending on how severe.

I think the problem with the disk is a physical damage, but not a scratch. The disk is old. And as time goes by, the materials change. They can shrink or get less transparent to let the laser through. Or get cloudy.

[maximus]

On my opinion, I just need the simplest drive, I can get. Or some kind of drive for DR, where I can control, what the drive is doing.

Try to find a read only drive that has one or more potentiometers on the board. Potentiometers = adjustability, although you may not know what you are adjusting I agree the older ones are more likely to have something like that.

[HaQue]

how about trying to image the cd using something like Linux and dd, or even hddsuperclone?

or look around for some older drives (but not too old as they sometimes did not read cdr's ) somewhere around the Pentium 3 / 4 era.

here is a data recovery tool allegedly for CD's
http://www.recoverdisc.com/

Also, try some CD cleaning first, there was a cleaning paste that was like car cut and polish that could sometimes help. be very careful though make sure cloth is very clean as you may add scratches.

[pepe]

the problem is if the drive cannot load TOC, it will report as empty to the OS. And you cannot address an empty CD drive.
Hacking the firmware, could lead somewhere, but there are more simple methods...

[fzabkar]

It won't help if the drive cannot read the TOC, but safecopy claims to recover CDs (audio and data) that have bad sectors.

safecopy is a data recovery tool which tries to extract as much data as possible from a problematic (i.e. damaged sectors) source - like floppy drives, hard disk partitions, CDs, tape devices, ..., where other tools like dd would fail due to I/O errors.

Safecopy includes a low level IO layer to read CDROM disks in raw mode, and issue device resets and other helpful low level operations on a number of other device classes.

http://safecopy.sourceforge.net/

[fzabkar]

To circumvent a bad TOC, there is a hotswapping trick:

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=102&t=143

[pepe]

yeah, that's what i was refering to...

[D_R]

Thank you. I'm going to modify a drive, so I can swap the discs without ejecting it. Let's try it out

[fzabkar]

yeah, that's what i was refering to...

Actually, you didn't refer to anything.

[pepe]

I was refering to easier methods. In fact, I 'invented' that method for myself about 15+ years ago, and never searched the web wether the cited method was published, so i didn't want to go deep in the details here.

[fzabkar]

I guess that means that I must have "invented" hot swapping because I was doing it 30 years ago with disc packs and magnetic tapes.

[pepe]

I am not familiar with the disc packs and drives of the 80's other than what i saw (the ones looking like a washing machine : ). So i also don't know what you might have done with them, just normal swapping of packs and tapes or something more tricky...

[fzabkar]

I am not familiar with the disc packs and drives of the 80's other than what i saw (the ones looking like a washing machine : ). So i also don't know what you might have done with them, just normal swapping of packs and tapes or something more tricky...

Something more tricky ...

[pepe]

nice...