Recover scratched discs with Iso Puzzle
CDs and DVDs become faulty over time. If you do use them regularly they may get scratches and it happens that sectors on the disk fail and can't be read anymore.
This happens usually in inappropriate moments, for instance if you need to access files on the disc.
Before you trash the CD or DVD you may want to try to recover most of the data on it with a program like Iso Puzzle.
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 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 when you run the program again using a new drive.
Just use the new drive as the source and the created flg file (in which the good and bad sectors are defined) as the destination. New recovered sectors are written to an IMP file which has to be imported into the iso image after the process completes.
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: (Download Removed)
I have used this program to successfully recover complete images of damaged dvds. However I have noticed with a lot of the newer dvd drives, in particular LG drives, if they encounter “read errors” then the drives automatically return zeros at hardware level for the given sector instead of returning a read error. So isopuzzle or which ever dvd software is being used doesnt know that a read error has actually occured, hence you end up with a corrupt iso file and isopuzzle reporting no read errors. A lot of the older IDE drives dont do this, my drive of choice is a Samsung TS-H552U which seems to be able to read disks with the most scratches, and at the same time actually reports any read errors to isopuzzle instead of returning zeros
where is the download link
The original site is no longer available. I have uploaded the latest version to our servers.
Genius!
thats cool, but Syahid i would give credit to the software as its the stubborness/inteligence of the software that completes the puzzle.
Great info Martin!
Looks like a decent piece of software. I bet it depends on cdrom players too.