The best practice in the beginning is therefor to clean the disk properly. One could start with a quick dusting using cloth that has been ideally designed for that purpose. This wont remove fingerprints and other dirt though. To tackle those you use liquids to clean the CD. This can again be done with specialized expensive solutions or some warm water and mild soap.

Sometimes the best CD cleaning efforts do not have the desired effect. If data on the CD is unreadable so called CD data recovery tools come to use which try to recover the data from the CD.

CD Recovery Toolbox

The data recovery tool has been specifically designed for CD, DVD and HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks. The application has been streamlined for ease of use as the recovery process can be initiated with just a few clicks. It will display the contents of the selected media giving the user the option to select specific files – or all – for recovery.

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Iso Puzzle

Iso Puzzle creates an ISO image of a selected CD or DVD flagging good and bad sectors at the end of the process to give the user an overview of the situation. It will also create a file on the local disk detailing the bad sectors that could not be read. The unique solution by this software program is to utilize different CD or DVD drives to read those bad sectors as error correction differs widely among drives.

CD Check

CD Check can recover unreadable files from disks. What makes it unique is the ability to create hashes of those files at the first startup. Those hashes can be used to compare the states back then with the current state of the disk. It does come with the means to recovery unreadable files from those disks.

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Copy Cat and Unstoppable Copier

Those two tools are copy software programs that try to copy files from a selected location to another one. They have been designed to use various reading techniques to copy files even from scratched or partially readable media.

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Do you know of additional free tools to recover CDs or DVDs? Let us know in the comments.

Iso Puzzle creates an iso image of the disc that you place in the drive. All good sectors, that are those that can be read without errors, are written correctly and flagged as good while bad sectors will be flagged as bad. There is a reason for this, you can use different CD and DVD drives to read the media and add pieces of the CD or DVD that another drive could not read. That’s where the puzzle aspect comes into play, some drives have a better error correction than others and it could be that you can recover the full disc if you try enough drives.

Only the sectors that the previous drives could not read are tried again with the new drive. Just use the new drive as the source and the created flg file (where the good and bad sectors are defined) as the destination. New recovered sectors are written in an IMP file which has to be imported into the iso image after the process has finished.

If the CD or DVD is not recognized at all when you put it into the drive you have to click on Force Size and on Drive Reported in the window that pops up. Click on start afterwards to start the process.

Update: The original site the software was originally posted on is no longer available. We have updated the latest (and last) version of the application to our own servers. You can download it from the following link: Iso Puzzle (28)