I have a re-writable disk that for whatever reason, (I think poor media and age) won't let me have access to the files on that disc. It freezes up "My Computer" as soon as I try to access that drive. Is there any way I can retrieve these files from the disc or are they gone forever? I thought about cloning the disc in the hopes that maybe by some miracle that might work, but haven't yet. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks.
If the disc was finalized and not formatted with packet-writing software, you have a better chance at recovering the data. Your drive is not reading the lead-in properly. Another drive from a different manufacturer may have better luck if its laser pattern on the disc is different from that of your drive. I have been able to recover data from discs by using as many as ten different drives to read every file on a rewritable disc that went bad. Some early 24X rewritable discs were notoriously unstable after a short time. This is common for storage media that try to move beyond the tried and true methods. I think that is one reason why almost no 32X CD-RW discs exist.
