There’s nothing more annoying than when your DVDs or CDs get damaged or won’t work properly anymore. This can often be caused by scratches on the playing area, corrupted data or just simple wear and tear. Despite all the promise of CDs and DVDs being hailed as “indestructible” when they were launched, the fact is that they are still prone to errors. Certainly, one of the problems is that as manufacturers have sought to lower DVD/CD production costs, discs are increasingly made from low quality materials which erode and are prone to faults over time.
The first thing to do if you suspect that one of your discs is damaged, is to test its integrity. You can do this with CD/DVD Diagnostic which analyses both CDs and DVDs for errors. The program can extract that data that can be salvaged for reburning on another disk. If CD/DVD Diagnostic has determined that your disc is indeed damaged but can’t salvage any data, then VCS Copy Cat may be your answer as it’s slightly more specialised when it comes to the extraction process.
Of course, these free solutions only offer a limited amount of recovery power. If you’ve lost some really important data on disc then you’ll need something a bit more powerful that may involve dipping into your pockets. One of the most comprehensive and professional DVD/CD recovery tools is CDRoller which can deal with all but the most stubborn discs. The same goes for Dead Disk Doctor which offers limited recovery options on the free version but also a powerful data extractor on the plus version.
