I am trying to restore three old MS Works WPS documents. Ten years ago they were saved to floppy disk, then a few years later, transfered to CD-R. Somewhere along the line, they became corrupted. Nautilus says they have a definite file size, but I can't copy them off of the CD and attempts at reading the contents with 'less' and 'cat' return "read error (press RETURN" and "cat: FILE1.WPS: Input/output error". Anyone have any suggestions for how to recover this data?

The first thing to try is to clean the CD. A smudge or scratch may be what is corrupting the data. If the files were corrupted when transferring them from floppy to CD, you may be out of luck if there was information loss.

You might try using ddrescue to copy an image of the CD to a file and play with that. Ddrescue will make several attempts to read bad areas.

You can mount the image as if it were a CD.
mkdir cddir
sudo mount -t iso9660 cdimage.iso cddir/ -o ro,loop,unhide

A text file would be easier to rescue, because you could search for the patterns you are interested in. This would allow you to copy portions of text from the image to a file. If you are lucky and the problem is with the filesystem, but the file itself is intact and not fragmented, you can use dd to copy a range from the image to a file.

Thanks much! Did the trick.