Please bear with me on the generality of this question, folks. Believe it or not, it does have bearing for the empeg.

I have a CDROM (CD-R). I used it in multi-session mode to continually archive files onto it a few years ago. At the time I was running NT4 SP3 which had a known bug in the CDFS device which related to session access. I believe the disk is Joliet formatted, but I am not sure.

At the moment, the disk is extremely awkward to read: it appears as if the disk does indeed contain the data still, and that the file system structure is still there. However:

- it takes ages initially (a few minutes) to read the disk on Windows, but does eventually come up.
- attempting to read files on the disk can take a long time or hang up, as if there are many retries going on.

It's likely this behaviour has resulted from corruption of the session directories during a failed write to the disk. It probably means the latest session directory is corrupt, but the earlier ones may still be there.

For various reasons, it's important for me to get to this material and retrieve all (or as much as is possible) from the disk. Before you all go "So where's your backup?", well this IS the backup

What I am looking for is a tool that runs either under Windows or Linux, that will allow me to mount the disk and inspect the directory structures on the disk to allow me to retrieve it manually.

Does anyone know of anything like this or can recommend anything, either free or commercial?

Silly question but have you tried it in a different, maybe a newer drive?

I have used CDRoller a few times to recover damaged CDRs.

Brand new Samsungs, compliant with just about everything. It's a logical filesystem issue rather than medium/error correction.

One more vote for trying different drives.
I've been talking to a co-worker about how frail burned CDs are. He managed to retrieve data from a poor, old CD by trying several computers.
I'm not sure which was most successful, an older drive or a newer one. I'll have to ask.

Yeah I had a disc that acted the exact same way as Rob's but put it in a different drive and it was perfect.

And... it was a Samsung drive that failed to read it. A Sony of the same age was fine.

Try GetDataBack NFTS. That may be too general; not session-aware. But it may scan the entire disc, regardless of session, and give you a sector and/or MFT view.

GDB has saved me a few times. Just make sure to check ALL of the options before you begin AND at each stage in the process. Some plainly basic functionality is hidden in check boxes which are scrolled off the screen in seemingly unimportant steps.

How about trying a raw copy with something like dd or ghost and then mounting the resulting image read/write so that you can run your filesystem recovery tool of choice? Would also rule out any issues with your cdrom drive.

-Mike

Some success has been had - more info soon.

If all else fails you can microwave it for 2-5 seconds. That'll fix it. >:)

-Zeke