CD-R Recovery

Of the hundreds of CD-Rs I have made myself I've run across six or seven, mostly very early ones, which have become unplayable. There's no evidence of delamination or bronzing but something has happened to the recording substrate to make the disc unbootable on any CD player I own.

In a couple cases I was able to reassemble the contents and burn new discs. In most of them this was not practicable.

This weekend I wanted to copy one of them for a friend of mine, and decided to see if my new Apple computer, with its "SuperDrive" that reads both CDs and DVDs, would read it.

Hallelujah, it did. I am now going through my small pile of unplayable CD-Rs and so far have a 100% recovery rate. This is great.

I guess I should tiptoe through my CD racks looking for old burns to see if I have any others, while I can still recover them.

I've run into that a few times with CD-Rs and DVD-Rs which failed on the players, but the computer was always able to read the discs so i could make new copies.