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CD readers can't rescue badly-recorded CDs. Use a burner instead, plus one of these programs.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T e c h n o f i l e
'Unrecoverable' files can be rescued from a bad CD, using IsoBuster for Windows or FileSalvage for OS X
July 2, 2006
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, The Post-Standard
CDs that you record on your computer have a special affinity for trouble. Of all the hardware questions I get in a typical year, CD woes rank at the top. And because avid photographers often put their irreplaceable digital photos onto CDs, the failure of even a single CD that holds family pictures can be heartbreaking -- especially if the camera's memory cards are erased and reused before anyone notices that the CDs refuse to yield up their contents.
In last week's column (www.technofileonline.com/texts/tec062506.html), I explained why CD recording is so prone to error. This week I'll describe programs you can use on both Windows and Mac OS X to recover lost data (whether images, documents or any other files) from an obstreperous CD.
I should explain that my test of recovery software wasn't a test at all. I heard through a local photo enthusiast that a fellow photographer had lost many gigabytes of priceless original photos on five bad CDs. The photographer had no backup copies of the photos -- they were no longer on the memory cards and weren't stored anywhere else -- so I took on the challenge. I asked a company that makes recovery software for Windows to donate a copy of its product, to try on my Windows PC, and I did the same for OS X.
The Windows software is IsoBuster, from www.smart-projects.net. It costs $25.95. The OS X software is FileSalvage, from www.subrosasoft.com. The downloadable version costs $79.95.
Alas, I wasted considerable time with the Windows software trying to do something it could not do. After writing to IsoBuster's software experts, I realized my mistake and tried again, successfully.
The mistake? I installed IsoBuster on a Windows PC that had a CD drive but not a CD burner. What I learned was that a standard CD drive (a CD reader, in other words) normally isn't able to detect partially burned or "unclosed" sessions on a CD-R; for that kind of recovery, you need to use a CD burner. (The burner isn't used as a burner in such recovery operations, but its extra reading ability is vital.)
When it was installed on a Windows PC that had a CD burner, IsoBuster did what it was supposed to do. It displayed all the files on the five CDs and was able to extract them.
But I did most of the rescue work on my Apple laptop (an iBook) running the latest version of OS X. When I installed FileSalvage, I found the Mac (which comes with a CD burner) handled the image-file recovery without drama, just as the Windows PC did. I then switched all operations over to the iBook, which I find much safer to work with than a Windows PC because OS X is not affected by Windows spyware and viruses.
FileSalvage costs more than IsoBuster, in part, because it's an all-purpose file-recovery program. In an unrelated mercy recovery operation, I used FileSalvage to recover every photo that had been erased from a large-capacity memory card. (Files aren't obliterated when they're erased -- they're simply marked as expendable if the space they take up is needed. So a recovery program usually has an excellent chance of getting them back as long as no new files have been added to the storage medium.)
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