recovering data from unfinalised CD?

Baddass · 5 Mar 2006 at 23:31

I'm trying to sort out a CD for a friend. Basically it was recorded on a music CD recorder on the fly as part of a concert. It's a normal CDR and you can see on the back of it that data has been burnt onto it. For some reason it didnt close when it was written and i'm trying to recover the data from it.

I've looked at the CD info in Nero and Roxio which both think it is a brand new CD, with no sessions on it. Sadly therefore, it isn't as simple as closing the session or finalising the CD. Has anyone got ayn suggestions on how to close this CD off / recover the data?

thanks

Caged · 6 Mar 2006 at 00:48

Try IsoBuster

Baron_Samedi · 6 Mar 2006 at 09:40

Good Choice!

Baddass · 6 Mar 2006 at 15:04

Caged said:
Try IsoBuster

it still can;t see anything on the disc, thinks it's a blank CDR

Baron_Samedi · 6 Mar 2006 at 15:18

Is there not a utility that can rip sectors from a CD in the same way as one might retrieve data from a hard drive that the MBR is toasted?

Overload · 6 Mar 2006 at 16:48

Hello there,

You may want to try CD/DVD Diagnostic (Link.) You have to pay for a full version which will be able to recover data but the trial version shouldtell you if anything is recoverable. I personally have not tried it but came up while searching for a solution to your problem.

I was wondering if you could try and view the data in a hex editor to see if the data was readable, but I'm not sure if that is possible.

Apologies if what I have suggested is useless.

vince3 · 6 Mar 2006 at 19:25

Try putting the CD back in the recorder that originally wrote it and Finalise it there.
My audio CD recorder (Marantz) has Finalise as a separate function. It plays its own unfinalised CDRs OK, and you can add to them until finalised.
As it happens, I can also play the Marantz unfinalised CDs on the PC CD/DVD writer but not the CD/DVD ROM - both Toshibas.

Baddass · 7 Mar 2006 at 08:32

Overload said:
Hello there,

You may want to try CD/DVD Diagnostic (Link.) You have to pay for a full version which will be able to recover data but the trial version shouldtell you if anything is recoverable. I personally have not tried it but came up while searching for a solution to your problem.

I was wondering if you could try and view the data in a hex editor to see if the data was readable, but I'm not sure if that is possible.

Apologies if what I have suggested is useless.

that program still sees the disc as blank. I'm not able to use the original recorder since it is my brother's disc and was recorded (or supposed to be

) at his school. I'll get him to try that since i'm not having any luck here at all.

vince3 · 7 Mar 2006 at 15:42

As some PC CD/DVD drives seem able to read unfinalised CDRs, could you try around friends and see if anyone can read the CD? CD writers seem to be better at this than just CD-ROMs.
If so it should be possible to finalise it on that PC.
If it can be read by a read-only drive, you should be able to copy it to a CD writer with Nero (and finalise the copy).

It just occurred to me - Nero can make image copies of CDs, so althought the disc may appear empty, I wonder if Nero would copy it sector by sector. The copy would still be an unfinalised CDR but written on a drive which should be able to read it as such.
You could finish up with a dud - but a try might be worth a blank CDR.