I recently backed up my home directory to a cd.
The files to be written were 703MB. The disk was 700.
Take a chance i thought.
The cd burned ok but hung on the fixate stage.
I had to kill the power to the whole system to get the writing software to shutdown. (don't ask me why i didn't call up the sys monitor and kill the process cus i can't answer that question)

Now reading the disk is OK, 95% of the disk's contents are OK but 1 folder,(which contains a couple of months typing -hours and hours of work) is not reading. The files all are present, with their sizes seeminly correct but they WILL NOT open in anything, no word processors can read them.

I'm thinking that they are lost. There are .txt versions in the same folder and they are unreadable too.

Does anyone know of any possible solutions...?

(i've just downloaded and installed a prog called datarecall but it doesn't work.)

many thanks

Well I'm not sure this will help you or not, but you could try.

I would make and iso.img of the cd, and them mount the iso...

mount -o loop ./iso.img /mnt/hopeforthebest

then you can try to open the file from their, cat the file..(if its a doc file...you'll have a buch of junk.. but all the txt should be their)

This has worked for me when I haven't taken care of my cd.. and have scrached the live'n h@ll out of them.. Maybe it can help you to.