Bog Roll ::

A friend came back from a long trip to the US. Because she was there several weeks, she had copied her digital pictures to CD so that she could put fresh pictures onto her camera's memory chip.

On returning home, she found that her Windows PC refused to read any of the CDs. Her husband was able to see some images on a Linux box, but hoping that the rest could be salvaged she dropped them off for me to see what I could do.

I've seen CD-ROMs refuse to read CDs that have not been closed properly, and I was hoping that by putting the offending discs on my DVD-RW drive I'd be able to read the CD.

When I took the Memorex CD-Rs out of the jewel case I saw at once what the problem was, the pen used to write on the upper surface of the CD had attacked the reflective layer on the CD, and from the underside it looked like someone had attacked the CD with a knife. Alas she had written close enough to the centre of the disc to damage the data at the end of the data write. I salvaged what I could, but about 10% of the images have been lost.

posted 21:22 :: /stuff :: permalink :: ^