A friend spoke to me tonight about a CD of photos she has that won't open. A message appears saying that the CD drive is not ready, like you would get if you attempted to open a CD before it had spun up to speed.
Two immediately obvious issues could be contributing to this problem. The most obvious problem is that she attempted to remove an untidy home-made label, and in doing so lifted a small piece of the metallic foil near the centre of the disc that has destroyed file structure information. My other suspicion is that the disc's author has written it with a drag'n'drop software like Easy CD or RecordNow and not converted it to a standard data CD at the end of the session. My friend's computer most likely doesn't have readers for the non-standard data CD formats, because it doesn't have burning software of its own. She will be bringing the CD to me in the morning, so until then our fingers are crossed that the damage has missed the data area and the problem is only that her computer can't read the disc. What can I do to help if the file structure is destroyed? Would it still be possible to clone the disc, faults and all, onto my hard drive and try to get at the picture files from there? I believe the data isn't on the foil but in a pigment layer beneath it. If that's true, is it feasable to patch the damage with a piece of kitchen foil in the hope that the pigment layer stayed with the CD and not with the detached flake? Any advice would be appreciated, TIA regards, Anthony Farr
