IsoPuzzle

The goal of this program is to recover as much as possible data of damaged, bad burned or scratched CDs or DVDs The purpose of this program is to recover as much as possible data of damaged, bad burned or scratched CDs or DVDs.

This version is experimental and supports only data CDs and DVDs with sectorsize of 2048 byte - Audio CD, VCD and SVCD are not supported.

How it works:

All readable data is stored in an "ISO" image file which can be read by various software such as "Daemon Tools", "WinRar" (needs iso-plugin) and most burner software like "Nero" etc. Please note, that image files greater 4GB need to reside on a NTFS disk!

Every succsessfully read sector is stored in the image file (*.ISO) and will be marked "good" in the corresponding "flag" file (*.FLG).
If a read error is encountered a dummy sector will be written which will remain marked "bad". In this case a random number of sectors are skipped for faster progress.
Reaching the end of the disk a retry loop will be entered until all sectors have been read or a selectable "Give Up Time" has been reached.

After selecting the "Source" drive and the "Destination" folder the copy process can be started by pressing "Start".
The filenames are taken automatically from the DVDs volume label if available.

The copy process can be interrupted at any time by pressing the "Pause" button and can be continued by pressing "Start" again.
This way You can try to complete Your image file even on different machines with different CD drives - often one drive can read some sectors which are unreadable for an other one.

For using different drives You can share the image file *.ISO (together with the flag file *.FLG) on a network drive or put it on a portable disk (USB).

Import function:

To avoid dealing with very large files You can use the "Import" function:
Assuming that You started on machine "A" and no more data comes from Your DVD.
Copy ONLY (!) the *.FLG file (e.g. via USB stick) to machine "B".
On "B" select "Destination" folder, where the *.FLG is located.
"Start" will create an "import file" *.IMP in the same folder. All readable sectors are now stored here.
After completion on "B" transfer the *.IMP to a location where it is accessible from machine "A".
On "A" it can be merged into the existing *.ISO image with "Import File"

Requirements: