Comments on: Extracting phantom files from old CDRW

Question: Extracting phantom files from old CDRW

benzenedream — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:50:41 -0800

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?

By: zsazsa

zsazsa — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:24:03 -0800

Run the disc through IsoBuster. It can extract files from optical discs with damaged filesystems or those with improper burns.

By: Dadoes

Dadoes — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:01:57 -0800

Check out TestDisk, PhotoRec and foremost. All available via apt-get if using debian/ubuntu.

By: ydnagaj

ydnagaj — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:08:26 -0800

What happens if you run 'file'on that iso?

By: benzenedream

benzenedream — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:01:07 -0800

PhotoRec did a good job of peeling out the files which had recognizable file boundaries, and was open source. Thanks to everybody that replied!