Optical media like CD or DVD is still in use, but not many people use them. They have been largely replaced by portable hard drives, memory cards and USB pen-drives. But individuals and organizations still have the CDs and DVDs they used many years ago containing the backups of important files. Some people used to store all their pictures and videos on such optical disks in late 90’s and early 2000’s. Since so much time has passed, those older disks might get damaged through aging of the chemical dye or they might also get scratched by over-use.
Damaged CD/DVD disks may fail to show any files in Windows File Explorer. When you try to copy files from such damaged media, it may result in bad media error or I/O error or something similar before failing to work. If you want to copy files from your damaged optical disks, then you can use a software called “CD/DVD Diagnostic”. This software can use low level reading of the raw data of the disk to ensure that physically undamaged parts are successfully read. You can then save this data to your hard drive.
Obviously, it is worth mentioning that CD/DVD Diagnostic will work better with a high quality DVD writer drive with better reading laser assembly. After loading the CD/DVD in your DVD drive, you can launch CD/DVD Diagnostic and select the DVD drive from the list. After this, you can see the table of contents of the selected media which you can copy to your hard drive. You can also choose to run a readability test to see if you are using a good disk or bad disk. Interestingly, it found errors even on a virtual CD drive loaded with an ISO image in Windows.
CD/DVD Diagnostic is not limited to CDs and DVDs. It can also read data from HD disks and Blu-ray disks. With its help, you can finally retrieve your files from your old or corrupt CD/DVD/BD disk collection.
You can download CD/DVD Diagnostic from http://www.infinadyne.com/cddvd_diagnostic.html.