I used CD Creator 5 to make some data disks, but did not finalize them. Hard drive crashed and now I can't retrieve the data. Will EMC 8 allow me to finalize the disks and see my data

Well, the question is whether or not you were using Easy CD Creator, as stated, or if you were using Direct CD, another part of the suite.

If you formatted the disc first, and then just dragged and dropped files onto the disc, then you were using Direct CD, which does what is called "Packet Writing" to put data onto the disc. I suspect this is what you were doing

If that's the case, then Drag-To-Disc (the packet writing part of the EMC 8 suite of programs) may be able to access the data. Of course, if you still have ECDC 5, you could reinstall that and should be able to access the disc using Direct CD. After that, you could get one of the utilities designed to recover data like that, ISO Buster and CD-Roller both have good testimonials.

In the future, whether you wind up using ECDC 5, or EMC 8, you should use the option for a Data CD that doesn't require you to format the disc first. This type of writing uses "Sessions" to write to disc, which puts the data in a standard CD-ROM format that is readable in any drive.

Good luck and let us know how you make out.

Unfortunately, if you have WinXP SP 2, I don't believe ECDC 5 will work... You'll have to load it on a different computer. Let us know how it turns out.

I think EMC 8 will read them--I dug out a couple of data CD's that I made several years ago with what I believe was CD Creator 5 (or possible 6) and tried reading them on my computer which now has EMC8. They both came up fine. Hopefully you will get the same result.

Ken

Any computer will read a Data CD written using sessions with ECDC 5. You don't need EMC 8 for that because written using sessions, it's seen as a "standard" CD-ROM disc. The real question is how the original was written, and since he says it was left with an "open session" then I suspect it was written with Direct CD, not ECDC.


Well... that's actually an open question on each system. It works sometimes, other times it doesn't. In both cases, it is unsupported. From my recollections, the people that had the best luck getting ECDC 5 to run with SP2 installed ECDC 5 after installing SP2.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. The 2 old "data" disks I referred to were made with Direct CD (either 5 or 6). These are the ones that I can read with in EMC 8. I no longer use Direct CD (or Drag to Disk), having since switched to using multisession Data CD's made with EMC 8.

Ken

These should be readable as is since XP has a built in Reader. You would not need D2D installed to read these.

It is more likely that these have just gone to that big packet writer in the sky.

Two 3rd party recovery programs that may be of help are IsoBuster, here, and CD Roller, here. Nethier is free but you can download a trial and see if they can read the discs.