Recovering CD-RW Files.

Hi Folks,
Around a month ago my laptop crashed and the harddrive went along with the motherboard. In any case, I finally bought a new computer and am still working on getting the old one repaired (its still unde warranty thankfully :-)). Stupid me, I hadn't made a backup in a while, but the backup I did make was on a CD-RW and as I later found out - CD-RW's and CD-R's aren't the most reliable format for backup. In any case, a lot of important files are on this CD-RW and I'd still like to recover them if possible. I've tried using Isobuster but that couldn't get at them. Any other ideas?
Respectfully,
David.

What happened to the disk that you're having trouble reading it?

It's possible that you just didn't close it to read on computers with out a udf reader (a cd that isn't a closed session or disc yet requires a special driver to be read). Try putting it into a computer with adaptec/roxio cd writing software and see if you can close the disc. I think they may even have a recovery option. If that isn't the problem, and it's not scratched physically, your best bet would be to find tools that read raw file formats and you could probably get important documents back.

As far as I know nothing happened to the CD-RW to damage it physically...And I can get most of the files off, just not certain ones. How would I recover raw data? What sort of program would I use to do that?
Respectfully,
David.

this wone help now but when ever you burn a cd you need to verfie it.(make sure the data was writen to it correctly) most burning software has an option to do this and if it doesnt then just use a program to get a hash value for the files you butned and then check it with the hash from the files on the cd.

an easy way to do this is to zip all the files up with winzip or some other compression program and then burn it to a disk. then try upzipping the file off the disk.

so some files do work?
you've just got some minor/hard to see scratches messing it up. Some cd's especially burnable ones are very sensitive to that kind of stuff. Find someone with a cd cleaning kit and have them buff it one time around and it should solve all your problems.

Thanks for all the advice. I'll try to verify next time and get a cleaning kit for this time.
Respectfully,
David.