OT: Data recovery from incomplete CD

[Devin Asay]

On Jun 22, 2009, at 7:25 PM, J. Landman Gay wrote:

> stephen barncard wrote:
>> I think she's talking about a data disc that didn't get finalized
>
> Right. Thanks everyone for the suggestions. Toast doesn't see anything
> on the disk either. But now I'm thinking maybe all these utilities are
> correct and the disk really is empty. I suspect that the 90%  
> completion
> I saw was the Finder creating a burn folder (I was too distraught to  
> pay
> much attention at the time.) The actual burn may never have happened.
> It's hard to tell looking at the CD itself whether those lines in the
> center are new or are part of its original state.
>
> And here I thought this stuff always happened to somebody else.

Try reading the disk with a Linux system if you've got access to one.  
A few weeks back the hard drive in my daughter's MacBook died. I  
pulled it out of the computer and put it into an external enclosure.  
Nothing I did on my Mac could even see it. Not Disk Utility, not Disk  
Warrior, not Apple's diagnostic disk, not command line utilities. I  
mentioned this to a friend who just recently became a Linux user. We  
connected the drive to his Linux box and boom! It showed up  
immediately. I was able to copy all of the data off of it before I got  
her a new HD.

HTH

Devin