A number of years ago, we discovered that nearly all of our firstborn’s earliest baby pictures were lost.  We had them on a CD-RW – which definitely worked (I checked it after making the disk, on two computers) – and it somehow, miraculously just disappeared.  (This is not the only time we had this happen.  But it’s the only one that’s really important.  We’ve stopped using CD-RW’s, because we don’t trust them.)  (We did discover much later that at least the photos of her first vacation, a trip with friends to the Outer Banks, weren’t on the disk.  They were taken with a film camera, so we still have those.)  All we can figure is that the registry was somehow corrupted on the disk, because we’re very sure that no one erased it.

Problem is, I can’t find any file recovery software (well, not anywhere near within our price range, anyway) that will handle a CD-ROM.  Most of the “home” stuff seems to be designed only for HDD’s.  Do any of my readers use file recovery software that will look at a CD-ROM?  (Yes, it’s been six years.  Yes, I still have this disk!  I keep hoping we’ll find a way to recover the images.  And, yes, I know I should back up my photos.  Unfortunately, this disk was the backup.)

[UPDATE 2/2014: I was finally able to find something, and recovered most (I think) of the pictures!  MiniTool Power Data Recovery.  If you need to recover a large amount of data, you’ll need the paid version, but at least you can try it first and know whether it’s going to do the trick for your particular problem.]