 |
|
James Coates
|
Diagnosis good for
recovering lost data on CD
Published March 25, 2002
Q. I recently e-mailed you about
a problem I had in opening a CD-R after I had added to it, and
only the added portion would open, thus making it impossible
to access a very large collection of personal genealogical
data on that disc.
Anyway, I received an e-mail from
Paul Crowley with CD-ROM Productions advising me that they had
seen what you wrote and advising me that they had what I
needed to open the malfunctioning CD.
Making a long story short, after running a demo they e-mailed
me, I bought and downloaded the full program, and it works
like a charm. It will save me many hours of going through my
old WWII pictures and others, scanning and tweaking them.
The cost of under $50 was well worth it even if I never have
to use it again. Thanks again for all of your help.
--
Jim Meeks, Tampa, Fla.
A. We're both lucky to have
heard from Paul Crowley, Mr. M. CD-ROM Productions, which
changed its name to Arrowkey on March 1, is based near Chicago
in Lincolnshire, and, as we both discovered, the company has
become Johnny on the spot as untold hordes of consumers are
horrified to fall into this trap of ruining CD-R discs just as
they are about filled up with treasured data.
Apparently, a great many CD-R users encounter this problem
when they use their CD-burning software to close off a CD and
later mistakenly write another session onto the same disc.
When this is done, the second session overwrites the directory
for data on the first session, and computers can't find the
earlier data.
Crowley's software displays icons for all
of the files on one of these fouled-up CDs and lets users
recover data by dragging the icons for each file onto the
desktop.
It's not exactly a cakewalk using this
recovery software, called CD-R Diagnostic, but it's well worth
the added effort when valuable data is at stake. I almost was
as delighted as you must have been to see the program ferret
out lost data on CDs.
The company's Web site (www.cdrom-prod.com/)
should be in the bookmarks of everybody in America with a CD-R
drive on their PC.
----------
Contact Jim Coates
via e-mail at jcoates@tribune.com or via snail mail at the
Chicago Tribune, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL
60611. Questions can be answered only through this column. Add
your point of view at chicagotribune.com/askjim.
