Hardware the best way to recover an old cd?

[migles]

my friend have an ancient label printer (that thing has serial and paralel ports! no usb!)

i have the original cd with the drivers, software and manuals, however it has some scratches but has loads of black dots.. the drive fails to read some parts of the disc..
curently i am trying to use nero burning rom to create a copy.. (when i was a kid this worked for scratched games when i had no internet to download them again)
after 20 minutes is still at 1 percent trying to ignore errors...

i also happen to have some old discs with recorded stuff with this black dots, is there something i can do to get back data?

 

[Firemoon]

You could always try that: https://www.oemailrecovery.com/cd_recovery.html

Just make sure you have cleaned the disk the best way you can. You could always go with that: http://www.wikihow.com/Clean-a-Dirty-CD

 

[migles]

You could always try that: https://www.oemailrecovery.com/cd_recovery.html

is this trustable? or will my computer get aids?
that microsoft partner logo is telling me to GTFO

 

[Firemoon]

is this trustable? or will my computer get aids?
that microsoft partner logo is telling me to GTFO

I use it time to time, it works fine, it's clean.

 

[Originality]

Another option is to try and find the latest drivers from the manufacturer website.

 

[Futurdreamz]

hat's the make and model? We might be able to find a copy of the drivers somewhere.

 

[migles]

Another option is to try and find the latest drivers from the manufacturer website.

the manufacter is long dead...
i found some drivers from other website, but i didn't tested them yet.. i asked mostly because this is an issue i noticed, people around here had cd's with stuff inside like old documents, pictures old music etc..
and the cd's after a few years get theese black spots so i was looking for a solution...

dealing with technology impaired people (or old people) is a pain.. they are used to record cd's with stuff they want to keep..
however nowadays with cloud services there is no more worries or usb drives
the thing is, theese people refuse to upgrade or adapt to new stuff. they use a windows 95 computer, they are really stubborn
"my computer still works, i paid 1500 bucks back in the day for it, it must last forever! young age doesn't value stuff anymore blablabla"
they gave me theese discs.. and i would like as a favour to recover all i can and keep it safe.. and burn new copies for them...

i don't know how they know how to burn a disc, because the computer is a total mess, 4 shortcuts to recycle bin, i once deleted the shortcuts they created 6 new ones and get angry because apparantly the recycle bin memory was full. i tried to explain them what shortcuts are, and that recicle bin doesn't work that way. but they don't care and say "i bought this computer before you could read, you don't understand how it works!"

so yeah. i just want to help them recover the stuff, burn new discs and move back to my life
i myself got several discs with that issue which i want to store into my usb hdd.. so yeah it's a win win situation...

 

[FAST6191]

In the OP it sounded like you were describing a pressed CD, ones with own documents and the like on it are overwhelmingly going to be burned CDs and when going beyond. After the initial hold it up to the light to check for foil damage, do a clean and then get a reasonable drive (whether you want to boost the laser strength varies, I would not do it as a first pass) and set a low read speed with a burning program to make it into an iso the means of doing things varies. After that you are probably going to be in data level recovery* as physical things you can do to discs are annoying and very limited, indeed other than maybe seeing about fixing delamination I am not going to go much further. For scratches that are not foil damage there are some things you can do, though I would usually just go find someone with the gear (not sure if second hand game shops still routinely have them but they did at one point and so I tended to use those).

*many optical formats would have data level redundancy, equally if it is a video then it might be fine if you can chop 2 minutes of bad footage out if they get the other 35 or something.

On the printer itself I would seek other drivers, possibly also look at Linux as things there are far less likely to vanish. The original maker might long since have vanished but if you track down which company purchased the remains/IP then you might find something. Even if you email the company and ask.

Finally a tip that took me longer than it should have to get. You can fire customers.