Reclaim lost data on CD?

Infopackets Reader Nick F. writes:

" Dear Dennis,

I've been an avid reader of your newsletter for quite some time. My question for you is with respect to a recent article that dealt with problems reading DirectCD discs. The same circumstances described in this article reminded me of a problem I had a while ago when I backed up some files onto a CD-RW disc prior to formatting my system.

After Windows was reinstalled and we reloaded all the important software again, I found that I could not open the CD-RW disc -- even using the same program, same disc drive, that had written it. Every time we inserted the disc, it asked us to install a small file to enable reading of R/W CDs; we would do so, and restart the machine, and then the same thing would occur. We eventually had to give up and nothing ever came off the disc.

My question was, do you know if there is any way to get this data off the disc? Nobody else has been able to give us an answer, not even the people who did the format of the computer for us. "

My response:

I think perhaps I may have a solution for you. Shortly after writing the article concerning DirectCD, a number of users emailed me and reported using a freeware program called "ISOBuster" to read data off problematic CDs (including DirectCD discs).

With ISOBuster, you can go in and view previous session on the CD and then extract the information to your hard drive. ISOBuster is free.

http://www.smart-projects.net/isobuster/