Damaged CD?

[John Beers]

I've run into a problem with a rewritable CD which I had set up with DirectCD. My system froze in the middle of writing from Adobe Photoshop and I had to ctrl-alt-del to reboot. When I loaded Photoshop, my computer refused to read the CD at all. The disc simply spun in the normal CD drive and would freeze everything when I put in the the rewritable drive. I used Scandisc on it and got a message stating that the disc was damaged and not repairable. Also, according to Windows Explorer, these is no information on the disc...it's read just like a new disc. I have a lot of important files on this CD-RW and would like to know if there is a way I can retrieve them.

P.S. This thread has been moved from Storage > General to Optical Jukeboxes & Drives. - Hp Forum Moderator

[Tim Malnati]

CD-RW media can be a problem with 'older' cdrom drives. Bottom line is that they can tend to be tempermental. My first suggestion is popping the disk into the newest pc you can find and seeing if it can be read there. If so, copy it all to this machine transfer it with some other method (network?). If not, I would assume that this disk is truely dead. Back in the old days there were some hard disk repair facilities that could truely work miracles. I'm not sure if any of them are still around and if they can help, but it may be worth a few phone calls if the data is that important. Other than that... SOL I guess. Sorry!