ddrescue
ddrescue is a nice and simple tool to rescue data from a half broken disk or cd, it does that by simply repeatly trying to copy chunks, in the first pass it will try big chunks which is fairly fast, in the second pass it will try to split the damaged chunks into damaged and undamaged areas, and in the following passes it will just repeatly try to read the still damaged chunks
This takes quite some time if the disk/cd contains many damaged areas and recovery may or may not be successfull in the end but one thing which had a significantly positive effect on recovery of a old cdr (no there was nothing important on it, i was just playing around with ddrescue …) was changing the cdrom speed with hdparm every 10 secs, yes thats probably not healthy for the drive so kids try it with someone elses drive, not your own :)
While playing with ddrescue i added some ascii vissualization of the recovery process
