Recovering data from damaged CD
 

Hi all,

I was wondering if there is any way of recovering tracks on a damaged audio CD.
I know the cd had 24 tracks but now cd players only show one (the first one).
There is no scratch on the polycarbonate surface but there is a relatively large (4 mm) ring which
shows no data

So i was asking myself if there was a way to dump the data on my HD and then
recreate wav files one by one (for the recoverable ones)

Have you tried a standard CD ripper like cdparanoia?

According to http://freshmeat.net/projects/cdparanoia/ this app "will also read and repair data from CDs that have been damaged in some way".

Yes i did, but no luck
i think the TOC was damaged...

you could always use a hexeditor to examine each individual sector... you could use it to look at the TOC or search for the bad sectors, and if necessary you could probably dump the data manually...

For linux, the only decent one I know is called 'hexedit' and it's text-based but works well In my opinion... there's also khexedit.

Also I think that a hex editor, in general, is one of the more important tools for any geek to master ;)

The 'dd' command lets you do low-level reads from a device. But I don't know what happens with an audio cd. My understanding is that the data on the CD is encoded with an error-correction code, which is converted by the drive, and if the damage is too extensive for the code to fix the drive will not return any data at all.

You could try something like 'dd if=/dev/cdrom of=bigfile'. See the dd manpage for more options.

Once you have an image file you could certainly use a hex editor and maybe write back the image with the -audio option on cdrecord (or whatever you use)

Maybe it is possible to hack the cdparanoia source code to bypass the TOC error. I'm not familiar with audio CD formats, so I'm not sure exactly what could be done.