I recently received two damaged DVD's from an overseas client who requested that i attempt to recover images from it. We had burnt the images to the disk earlier in the year here in NZ (and checked them) and it wasn't until they arrived home and wanted to see the images again that realized something was wrong.

They sent me an email first explaining that they had done little more than put the disk into the computer.

I received the disks the following week and was perplexed. I wish i had taken a photo of it so perhaps could tell me what happened. To me it looked as if something had been dropped on the back of the disks resulting in radial scratches from the top side that went all the way through but stopped short of breaching the underside. The indent definitely originated from the top side of the disk but i simply can't imagine how it could happen inside a disk drive. One of the disks had a burnt hole where it looked as though the disk had stopped spinning and the laser had burnt a hole right through it. I could understand the burn ... and as you tell the disk was not in a good way. Using Windows XP the disk would start to load and then stop reporting that there was not even a disk in the drive. The customer had already taken the disk to two places that reported it was unrecoverable.

Various DVD recovery tools such as isobuster and cdroller reported a corrupt file system. While they could see the images on the disk complete with properties and sizes ... it simply could  not copy the data. I remembered i had installed ubuntu and windows xp in a dual boot setup on a machine at work in case windows decided to pack it in i could still access the drive from Linux. I decided at this point i would boot into linux to create an image of the disk before going to town on it. My plan was to backup the disk, fill in the scratches with a reflective silver pen and see what happened from there.

Amazingly when i inserted the disk to make a backup of it, Ubuntu opened the disk right up and asked me what i wanted to do with the images. Woohooo. I started copying files to the hard drive and waiting for the part of the disk where the scratches were. Ubuntu stopped ... assessed the situation and gave me a choice of skipping the file and moving on to the next one. Gotta love linux.

I managed to recover a good 95% of the photos from the disk and send them back to England to a very grateful customer. I can only imagine that windows will journal a disk when it is inserted and if one of the links in the chain is broken the whole process falls flat on its face. So in this instance Linux won some more brownie points and i will start booting the dual boot computer into linux to try and get the boss to start using it.