Any way of reading a dodgy disk, please?

[Olde Crone Holden]

A few years ago a contact in Canada kindly sent me two disks with a lot of information on them.

Being even less computer savvy than I am now (lol) I ignored a warning message which said "This disk is corrupted".

Shortly after this I had such a major virus on my computer that I had to buy a new computer. It may just have been an unfortunate coincidence as I did not have any virus protection in place on my old computer, but I have never dared try these two disks again.

I would really like to read these two disks again. Is there a safe way of doing it on my presently virus-free computer? (I have AVG installed).

Thankyou in advance!

OC

[KiteRunner]

What kind of disk is it - a floppy or a CD?

[Olde Crone Holden]

Oh, sorry, it's a CD!

OC

[Lyn A]

Scan it with AVG before opening it

Open My Computer and right click on your CD drive . This should give you the option to scan with AVG.

[Olde Crone Holden]

Thankyou Lyn! I will try that.

OC

[Hugo]

You could take it down to your local Library or internet-cafe. I would expect them to have a effective virus checker in place and to automatically check every portable disc every time it is used.

Hugo

[PeteW1959]

Opening the disk and looking at what files are there is not going to infect your PC, you have to open a file or boot your PC from the CD for that to happen, and then only certain files carry viruses.

Do you know what files they are? Viruses are only carried in executable files (usually with .exe or .com extensions), windows system files (.sys or .dll) and documents for applications that support macros (.doc, .xls). If you have a recent version of Office it will ask if you want to open a file with a macro in it, and at that point I would be suspicious.

Pdf and picture files (.pdf, .jpg, .tif, .bmp, .gif), gedcom files (.ged) and plain text files (.txt) cannot transmit a virus directly, although they can contain the code for a virus but you need to pick up the bit that activates it as well.

PS, the list of file extensions above is not exhaustive.

However, if the last time you opened the disk you got a message that the disc was corrupted, that is not likely to be a virus, it is more likely that the disc is damaged in some way. If it won't open, try another PC, I have a couple of CDs that only open on one computer.

Failing that there are software packages that can recover data from corrupted discs, but they are complicated to use and the results are more often than not dissapointing. There are companies that specialise in recovering data, but they are expensive, it just depends how valuable the data is.

[TrevorFranklin]

I have used this simple to use program to recover files off corrupted CDs and Memory stickes

CD Recovery | CD DVD Data Rescue software, featuring BD HD DVD