A Starter's guide on recovering damaged and rotten CDs
The guide details methods for recovering data from damaged CDs, emphasizing preventive measures, specialized tools like ddrescue and dvdisaster, and the importance of understanding standard copying limitations.
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This guide provides a comprehensive overview of recovering data from damaged or rotten CDs. It begins with a personal anecdote about finding a damaged CD and the realization that data recovery is possible. The guide emphasizes the importance of preventive measures against disc rot, suggesting options such as cloud storage, archival-grade media, and generating error correction codes (ECC) using tools like dvdisaster. For recovery, it highlights the limitations of standard copying methods when dealing with damaged discs and recommends specialized tools like ddrescue, dvdisaster, and TestDisk. Each tool is explained in detail, including installation instructions and specific commands for creating disc images and recovering data. The process can be time-consuming, but it allows for the recovery of as much data as possible, even from severely damaged media. The guide concludes with instructions on using PhotoRec for file carving from the created disc images, ensuring that users can retrieve usable files from their damaged CDs.
- Preventive measures against disc rot include cloud storage and using archival-grade media.
- Specialized tools like ddrescue and dvdisaster are essential for recovering data from damaged CDs.
- The recovery process can be lengthy but allows for resuming if interrupted.
- TestDisk can be used to create disc images, while PhotoRec is effective for file recovery.
- Understanding the limitations of standard copying methods is crucial for successful data recovery.
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7 commentsMy biggest savior was a Pioneer BDR-AD07BK which managed to read some discs that other drives couldn't even get the TOC off!
I wrote a gnu-ddrescue wrapper back then to avoid accidentally resuming a read to the wrong iso (only ever tested on alpine): https://github.com/9001/usr-local-bin/blob/master/miso
This is also the reason why all-over-print CDs are better survivors than discs whose obverse design integrates the raw silver. Note that this is specific to CDs — DVDs and BDs have protection on both sides!
I ran ddrescue on two different DVD drives and a blu-ray drive, up to the point where 48 hours would pass with no new data recovered. This left me with still several minutes of video that was unwatchable.
I solved it by spending about $12 to get used copies of all 3, which ripped fine. Any idea(s) that I could try had that option not been available?
Can't store some data reliably for a long time? You can mitigate it by storing some other data reliably for a long time.
It was really handy to get scraps off a disc that was very damaged.
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