Hello,
I hope that other forum members will be able to give me advice about recovering data from an unreadable CD-R.
My father gave me a CD-R on which some digitized photos were saved about 10 years ago by a photography shop, in JPG-format. The CD-R seems to be unreadable, it is not recognized by Windows at all. After a survey of the forum, it seems to me that the most likely explanation is CD-R dye ageing. (Interestingly, other CD-R media from the same batch do not seem to give any problems.)
I have tried to read this CD-R medium with four different laptops (running Windows 2000, XP, 7), using CD-R, CD-RW, and DVD-RW drives. The outcome is identical for each case, i.e., the CD-R disk is not recognized.
For recovery data software, I tried "CD Recovery Toolbox Free 1.1.17", which did not recognize the disk. Another software, "Isobuster 3.1", is able to recognize the amount of data saved on the disk after trying to read it for about 10 minutes (it reports 29.05 MByte, which is about the amount I expect), but when attempting to recover the data then, almost none of it can be read.
In the past, I encountered the phenomenon that some CD-R media could not be read reliably on some CD-ROM drives, but would be read just fine on other drives. Would anyone know a particular type of CD/DVD drive that can deal better with difficult cases like my unreadable CD-R?
Many thanks for any advice you might be able to provide!
