Help!

[fpb]

Last night, in order to clear some space on my hard drive, I transfered more than 400Mb of memory to a rewritable CD (one I had used a couple of times before, which might be significant). This morning, having resolved the problem that asked for space to be cleared, I thought I would take the memory from the CD back to the hard drive. Only, my computer absolutely refused to read the CD. It knows it is a CD, it knows that it has a lot of stuff on it - since the data refer to 277Mb free space - and it knows its name, but it does not recognize any of the hundreds of files on the CD at all. Since the items involved nclude dozens of songs, pieces of classical music, e-books, and so on, I am not disposed to just write them off.

Can anyone suggest something I could do to open this CD, or a community or website or blog where I could go for reliable advice? (Don't suggest Microsoft, they're useless.)

Thank you.

Comments

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

A) Make sure that it can read other CDs. If it doesn't, make sure your drivers and Windows is completely updated. If that doesn't resolve the problem, try running a complete virus/spyware/adware scan on your system (plenty of good freeware programs are available, if you don't want to pay for Norton or McAffee). If it still won't work, your disc drive may need to be replaced.

B) If it does read other CDs, try to access the files from another computer.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but... It reads everything beautifully, and another computer has also refused to read the CD in question. The trouble must be with the CD.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Does the other computer do the same thing with the CD? Reads the amount of data on the CD, but not the files?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

There is a program called IsoBuster that I think can recover data in that situations, but it's not freeware (and I haven't used it myself, so I can't vouch for it).

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, knowing that there is software for this sort of thing is already a step forward. Thanks again.

[absurdwords.livejournal.com]

There are some freeware data recovery programs for cd-roms:

http://www.softplatz.com/Soft/Utilities/File-Disk/Stellar-Phoenix-CDRom-Data-Recovery-Software.html

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Back-Up-and-Recovery/CD-DVD-Data-Recovery.shtml

http://recovery-review.com/cd_dvd_recovery_tools/

I never tried any of those, because I never had that problem, so be careful.