Performing Data Recovery
While there are numerous stories of people repairing their disks with simple toothpaste, wood, plastic or metal polish, those are best first tested on media you don’t particularly care about. Maybe you’ll get lucky, and the abrasions might clean up the surface enough for the drive’s laser to read through the plastic – the worst that can happen is that you’ll have a permanently unreadable CD.
The same applies to cleaning CDs with window cleaners, rubbing alcohol, car polish and other substances – try them on less worthy CDs first. If you’re too afraid to physically alter the disk, contacting your local second-hand CD shop might prove fruitful, and they commonly charge little per disk, making it very cost-effective. Naturally, minding your fingers around your DVDs is your best option – holding the disks by the rim, carefully placing and removing them from drives and cases will generally keep your opticals in good health.
Should all that fail, you’d do well to somehow extract data from the media. Sometimes, a simple copy-paste will preserve the data, after a few seconds of struggle per data chunk, depending on your drive quality. In other cases, using special tools such as IsoBuster for your data CDs and DVDs, and ExactAudioCopy or CDex for your audio CDs might help you save your precious data or music. Once on the hard-drive, you would do well to either keep the files on it, or burn them to a higher-quality media.
By far the best solution to preserving your original disks is to make backups – that is, if copy-protection and the local laws allow you to do so. That way, you can keep the original safely shelved, while the copy gets used and abused by your CD drive or discman. If you have the healthy habit of burning backup CDs or DVDs, and you need to read data off them often, making a redundant (second, backup-of-a-backup) copy of the media would be a very viable solution. If your data is too valuable to make multiple copies, burn backups only on proven media (ones you’ve had the best experience with in terms of longevity), and treat your single backup with care. Your data is as safe and readable as you treat it.
Written by Boris M
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Sweet mother of god! Don’t run chkdsk /f it’ll just de-link any files in damaged clusters from your file tables rendering them essentially gone. And for that matter why the heck are you running any utilities on a failing drive? You need to force clone or blind copy the drive to another drive or an image immediately and then work on the copy. Checkout the hddguru.com forums for some useful info from data recovery professionals (and newbs).
Great article, helps data recovery customers with their situation greatly. Please do your research before ever choosing a trustworthy company as there are many scam and basement operation data recovery companies out there. There is also a website that is online called datarecoverycomparison.com that actually allows you to review your data recovery experience, and review the company that you had the experience with. Most people with nightmare stories can post them on this site and have that company exploited to the public, shedding light on their corruptness and unprofessionalism. Also if you have had a good data recovery experience you may post that on this site in support of that company. Then each company is rated on a 1 to 5 star system, 5 being the best, 1 being the worst. If smart consumers go on this site and help expose the unethical hard drive recovery jobs that they have gone through, they will help other consumers avoid these companies, and hopefully help these companies go out of business; it will also help the companies that are trustworthy and professional flourish within the recovery business. Feel free to check it out and leave review to help your lifehacker viewers choose a trustworthy and honest data recovery company, avoid those nightmare expereinces with your data recovery.