Extracting phantom files from old CDRW

October 1, 2008 12:50 PM

I have a legacy CDRW which shows up empty when mounted in either Linux or Windows. Extracting an iso image under linux via dd yields greppable strings which indicate files are hiding inside. How do I extract the files without knowing what format or filesystem they are in?

Mounting the iso as a loop device in Linux yields no listable files. This disc is from ~2000. I assume the final FAT written to the disc is either corrupt or unreadable but files are written earlier on the disc. Is there a "file boundary guesser" that I can pipe the ISO to, which will spit out the possible files?

posted by benzenedream to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Run the disc through IsoBuster. It can extract files from optical discs with damaged filesystems or those with improper burns.
posted by zsazsa at 1:24 PM on October 1, 2008

Best answer: Check out TestDisk, PhotoRec and foremost. All available via apt-get if using debian/ubuntu.
posted by Dadoes at 4:01 PM on October 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

What happens if you run 'file'on that iso?
posted by ydnagaj at 7:08 PM on October 1, 2008

Response by poster: PhotoRec did a good job of peeling out the files which had recognizable file boundaries, and was open source. Thanks to everybody that replied!
posted by benzenedream at 8:01 PM on November 4, 2008