Have a customer that brought me a bad hard drive. Their "consultant" was told two weeks ago that the machine seemed to be running slow. The consultant said to turn it off and let it rest a while.

The customer used the machine for a couple more days and the problem returned. The "consultant" said it was probably a virus. The customer ran a while longer (total of two weeks I'm told) and then the consultant picked up the machine and it appears he still didn't realize the drive was going bad as he tried to fix their "software problem."

So I looked at the hard drive today and it has lots of bad sectors. I'm working on that.

But the customer was also making backups on CD-RW. But none of the CD-RW disks they were using appear to have anything on them. I can tell they've been used by looking at the bottom. But I have no idea what app they would have been using. I don't know if they were packet writen or what.

Any recomendations for good software for trying to recognize some sort of filesystem on CD-RW/DVD disks?

Hi
You can try a program called CdRoller: http://www.cdroller.com/
Have done the job for me many times.

Regards/ Bosse

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

if you look at the cd itself or dvd it has a groove in them
when information is burnt onto the disks

if there is nothing there it just looks smooth
there is no data on the disk at all

the best program for dvd or cd recovery is http://www.isobuster.com

Yeah, they absolutely look like they've been written to, as I can see the change is color in the bottom of the media on the one I examined.

I tried a few apps and it appears that the consultant had them backing up the wrong data. Ug, what a consultant! They would have been better-off without any consultant whatsoever!

In any event I was able to get an image of the hard drive. Lots of bads, the headers for their data files look consistent so we will see if their software developers can use any of it.

Thanks for the help.