I have a CD-R my mom burned of Family Photos to backup and save. She gave it to me and said it doesn't work and that she deleted the original Files When I look at the back of the CD I can tell that there is at least 650Meg on the CD but apparently its not Finished/Closed. What can I do to retain this info and save it for her so it's not a years worth of saving and scanning lost? I Run WinXP and even tried finding it in Linux with no luck.... Any Help is Always Help. Thanks Phil
why/how was it burned leaving the session open? that doesn't make much sense... try opening the disc in a burning application such as nero.
It is typical that the only way to finalize a disc is to have the original recording drive in the original computer close the disc because only they would be compatible with the last information put on the disc. Multisession recording is always tricky because it is difficult to link sessions in a way closely enough for a drive to seamlessly read the whole disc. If that cannot be done, another option is to buy data recovery software for CD-Rs (sometimes also usable for flash memory) that will attempt to reconstruct a temporary table of contents based on the files and file names the software can read from the disc. Finalizing is simply writing the permanent table of contents onto a disc, but recovery software can often rebuilt a table good enough to extract the files to a hard drive so that a user can write another disc in a disc-at-once session and finalize it.
