With the release of portable and more powerful storage drives, the number of users who still use CD / DVD discs is decreasing. However, there are still a very large number of people/businesses still using CD or DVD discs to store music, videos, recordings or other important files.
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Since CDs or DVDs are vulnerable to scratch, being corrupted or getting damaged easily, there is a risk that the data will not be read, thus becoming inaccessible to any type of player.
So, is it possible to save data to a scratched or damaged CD or DVD? If you find yourself in a similar situation and need to recover data from your storage media as soon as possible, there are several reliable solutions you can consider for recovering your CD. These procedures can repair damaged or scratched discs and recover corrupt files within them. Read on to get the details.
Manual disc control
Before trying to repair the DVD / CD disc using software, it is useful to start with a manual checking process. In this way, you will immediately understand if there is any physical damage and you will know where to start for the repair of the memory medium:
Step 1:
Check and wipe off the dust covered by the CD or DVD disc if present with a jewellery cloth.
Step 2:
Reinsert the CD or DVD into your computer’s DVD drive or CD-ROM and check if the disc is accessible.
If the pc reads it, but the files are still corrupt, the problem is not of a hardware nature. If not, go to the next step.
Step 3:
If the surface of your CD or DVD is smooth and scratch-free, you can turn to professional CD recovery software for assistance. But be careful- if your memory device is found to be too scratched, there will be no way to fully recover your data.
So, if the above steps have led you to believe that the problem is more software than hardware in nature (so you find yourself in a situation where your CD has few scratches but continues to be unreadable for the PC player) you should consider downloading software that will allow you to recover illegible data saved on your drive.
But let’s see together the list of the best free CD / DVD recovery tools that are on the web right now.
Dvdisaster
Dvdisaster is actually an application that analyzes recoverable data saved on optical media to help repair files in case of reading errors. It does this by using error correction codes similar to recovery records built into RAR archives.
Another feature of the program is the option to scan a CD or DVD for sector errors which will test the readability of the disc. Just run the program, make sure the drive is selected from the drop-down menu and then hit Scan. To understand if your disk still works, just look for the green sectors highlighted in the graphic shown by the program. When the tool highlights red parts, it means that those peaks in the graph are parts of the disk that cannot be recovered, and it will therefore be impossible to save the data on our PC.
IsoPuzzle
IsoPuzzle can recover data from damaged or scratched DVD-CDs. The goal of this program is to retrieve as much information as possible from the storage disks. This version only supports data CDs and DVDs with a sector size of 2048 bytes- Audio CDs, VCDs and SVCDs are not supported.
IsoPuzzle helps recover data from scratches and damage in another way of laser discs. The program reads the disk sector and each sector is read and stored in a *. ISO. After reading the disc, the program restarts, repeatedly trying to get information from those sectors even if the first attempt was unsuccessful. The names of the created files are extracted from the DVD label.
The copying process can always be interrupted by pressing pause and then restarting. This method allows you to try using different disk drives. If you want to complete data recovery on another computer, you need to specify the path to the program that created a *. ISO.
IsoBuster
IsoBuster is a powerful data recovery tool. It supports all the different CD and DVD players out there, supports hard drives and all possible memory cards, USB sticks, image files and all the different file systems.
Basically, when you select a drive, IsoBuster immediately scans the content quickly and shows the sessions, tracks, partitions and file systems it can find.
In case of damaged CD / DVD / BD or HD DVD optical media or if it has been written incorrectly, you may run into the problem that some players are able to obtain more data than other models. This means that some devices are able to read more data than others. If you have any major problems, try a number of CD / DVD drives, go to your friends or neighbours and ask if you can try it in their CD / DVD ROM drive.
CD Recovery Toolbox
CD Recovery Toolbox was developed to recover damaged files from different types of discs- CD, DVD, HD DVD, Blu-Ray, etc. Use it to restore and recover information lost due to some mechanical damage of the disk such as superficial scratches or due to bad recording. The program can recover data from CDs and DVDs that are considered lost or unreadable by the DVD drive. Depending on the damage level, the recovery progression can take a slightly longer time in some cases; the files may not be recoverable.
The free CD Recovery Toolbox scans any CD and DVD disc and finds files and folders located in readable sectors. We should mention that there may be some information on the drive that cannot be recovered. Not all files and folders can be found, depending on the degree and location of the damage.
