I have a CD with photos, which I unfortunately do not have backup copies of. I would like to salvage the photos, if possible, but don't know what kind of options I have. I know Linux can do amazing things in this area that Windows simply cannot.

I can 'dd' the entire disc to the hard drive with no problems. But the computer won't read the disc as it is (I get error messages indicating general failure). I try to mount the hard drive image as an iso and it won't - says it can't determine filesystem.

I just wanted to know if there is an app that would let me scan the disc and try to salvage what I can from the CD. The disc has no scratches or imperfections and it was burned on good media. It was burned with Roxio on Windows XP on a different computer than my Linux is installed on.

ISO Buster claims to have found some things on the disc, but it costs $$$ to do the actual read. Is there a Linux clone of ISO Buster?

Any thoughts or ideas?

Try photorec, some distros even have it in their repository. It should work really well for pictures. Just bear in mind, however, that all your pictures will come out without their names. You'll have a lot of sorting and renaming to do. And make sure to back up to a different drive, one that is at least the size of the partition/drive you want to recover.

You might look at ISOmaster it MAY be able to salvage something from the ISO.

It MIGHT be that the drive that the disk was burned on is out of alignment. If you go back to that drive it MAY be able to read the disk fine.

Good Luck
Lazlow

Photorec did the trick!

The original photo and file names were lost, but weren't too hard to reconstruct using the meta-data (exif) in the photos.

Thank you!