Photo Paul Goldenberg
Recover Lost Data from CD and DVD Media
October 01, 2007

 

Did you just put a perfectly fine looking CD or DVD into your computer, only to find that your PC does not see any files on it? Does your computer fail to read an important file from a recordable media?

CDRoller by Digital Atlantic Corp. will read the unreadable media, and gain access to inaccessible or damaged files.

Sometimes you scratch a disk, and sometimes they go bad because of the storage conditions, or even their age. You might get a disk recorded with a faulty CD or DVD burner, or created with non-standard or badly configured CD/DVD mastering software. Low quality media is also common. The disks may be cheap, but they make data reads unsure even on the CD/DVD burner with which they were recorded, and even worse on different drives.

If you try to copy damaged files from such disks by using Windows Explorer, you most likely won't get anything. Your PC may even freeze for a moment trying to access unreadable data. Recovering files with an expensive dedicated data recovery service was the only option available until very recently.

CDRoller does not use standard methods to access damaged media. Instead, it accesses CD and DVD disks directly, scanning the surface track by track and searching for lost data and deleted files. CDRoller recognizes most popular CD and DVD authoring software such as Roxio, Ahead Nero Burning Rom, and Sonic, and accesses data directly, bypassing Windows default routines.

Even if your disk is scratched or physically damaged, CDRoller may still be able to rescue your important files. It scans the disk surface thoroughly and re-creates its file and directory structure, allowing you to recover files that you thought were lost forever.

Every now and then you might even encounter a disk that is not recognized by your PC at all. This might be due to extreme data corruption, but there also might actually be nothing wrong with the disk itself. Maybe that CD or DVD is just not intended for being viewed on a PC. It may be a movie recorded with a DVD camcorder, or a TV capture made with a standalone DVD recorder, or even a photo CD created with a Sony Mavica CD digital camera. Generally, you won't be able to play such disks on your PC. But what if you still want that movie or those pictures on your computer?

CDRoller recognizes most stand-alone DVD recorders, video camcorders and digital photo cameras. You will be able to recover DVD video into standard MPEG files that are ready to play back with Windows Media Player, and copy digital pictures from your photo albums to your PC.

Even if none of your disks are bad at the moment, it still makes sense to ensure that they are not developing problems, and that you will be able to read your important data tomorrow as successfully as you can today. Sometimes you can open a file with no visible problem, but in fact Windows is trying hard to read that particular disk by slowing down the reader or re-reading the same file several times until it gets the data correctly.

CDRoller includes an extensive CD/DVD integrity tester that scans your media and reports any potential problems such as unsure reads or multiple attempts to read a file. And just in case you need to burn a disk or erase a re-writable one, CDRoller also comes with a built-in CD/DVD data burner and eraser.

CDRoller is available as a free evaluation download. Get your copy now, or read what others have to say on how it saved their important data.