How To Recover Data From Scratched Or Damaged Dvds/Cds

One of my favorite TV shows is The office. I love that show but it also takes up a lot of the hard drive space, with each episode of 350MB. I clutter my hard drive space due to this show, and that’s just this one show, not including other shows like Grey’s Anatomy or Supernatural. So, naturally I burn the shows onto DVDs, as it’s a cheap and easily accessible way to store data. But the only problem is the fact that CDs or DVDs aren’t invulnerable to all types of damage, and in fact, even a small finger print or scratch can make a DVD/CD player not able to read the disk. If you try to copy/paste the file on the damaged disk onto a computer, you usually get an error saying the file is corrupted, or damaged. But I found some really handy programs that can solve such problems, which I thought I’d share with you all today.

Method 1: CD Recovery Toolbox

CD Recovery Toolbox Free was developed for recovering damaged files CD, DVD, HD DVD, Blu-Ray etc. You can use it to restore information lost as a result of some mechanical damage of the disk (scratches, chips, different spots on the surface) or as a result of incorrect recording. This program can recover data that was considered lost.

To recover your data, insert you DVD or CD onto your drive and the CD recovery toolbox will search for the files already present on the disc, select the files you want to recover and press next.

Method 2: Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier

Roadkil’s Unstoppable Cleaner recovers files from any kind of damaged disk. It allows you to copy files from disks that give ‘corruption‘ errors, and those that are scratched. The program attempts to recover all the parts of the file that are still readable, and ignore the damaged parts. The program is tiny, and it needs no installation, so you can just jump straight in.

Method 3: ISO Puzzle

The goal of ISO Puzzle is to recover as much as possible data of damaged, bad burned or scratched CDs or DVDs. This version supports only data CDs and DVDs with sector size of 2048 byte – Audio CD, VCD and SVCD are not supported. Before you can start using IsoPuzzle, you’ll need to download WNASPI32.DLL from Nero and place it in the IsoPuzzle’s directory.

Just remember that you’ll have a part of  the file that is recoverable, the part that was originally damaged, will be skipped, as these programs don’t repair the disk, but instead recover all other parts of the file. So, for example, if you’re watching a film, 2 minutes of the film might be skipped, due to the fact that the part skipped was damaged.