[alicewong]

Somebody I know recently burned a backup of his documents on a cd, but the cd for some reason is not readable. He reformatted the hard drive with a fresh copy of xp on it. Is there some software (preferrably free) that can recover the old data on the hard drive? Anybody can recommend a good one?

[yPuqQ248]

Always check the back up media is good, cdrw are awesome for these sort of problems.

I had a good experience with ACR recently, deleted my employment folder with my C.V. and history in it [thumbdown]

Got it back tho.

AND the pictures of Chantelle off Big Brother with her narps out

Just noticed you have installed xp, you are likely to have lost some stuff sadly.

[feAilei1]

Not free (dont think there is a free package), but we used this at our last company and can vouch for its excellence. Its not too expensive either.
http://www.recovermyfiles.com/

**actually there are some free packages you can try!

[ronaldasten]

Tried different computers? That's the first thing I do if a CD is unreadable, I try a different cd drive.

[alicewong]

Tried on 5 different drivers, the cd is definitely flakey.

Gonna try NTFS-reader first, let's hope it can recover at least a few things...