I know it's probably a lost cause, but is there ANY way at all to get data back from a broken (literally. In half) CD? It's amazing that I can't find anything on Google. A "cracked" CD doesn't mean what it used to. ^_^

NOPE Well, not unless you are willing to spend lots of money, who knows? WHAT KIND of cd is it? If its a legitimate, that is, non pirated CD for some commercial software, you might just get a replacement from whoever made it. If it's some home burned backup you made, you are toast. (I donnoo, havta think, here, but I don't believe I've EVER broken a CD that I valued, much.)

Sorry jen, there's not much you can do short of using a microscope and spending a hell of a lot of time.

If the edges of the break are not frayed and you can carefully fit it back together and maybe hold it together with thin tape on the top, then it might be possible to recover some data from a copy of it. This takes a good CD-Rom drive and a program that can make an ISO image of a CD or at least copy an image. Something like the old CDClone software. The trick is to try to make a copy of the damaged CD, using software that will ignore errors, and then work with the copy. The copy process, if it can be told to ignore read errors, then might be able to make a copy of the CD and get enough data off of it. The problem is, that when errors are ignored, the error record is filled with zeros. So many of the files would be corrupted with this. But some might be recoverable. I once did this with some success on a broken CD with some critical data. Was able to recover about 20% of the small files OK. I later had to take some clear fingernail polish and carefully put a very narrow and thin coating over the crack so that if would read the CD a little better. Was then able to recover almost 1/3 of the small files on the CD. Reading large files was useless due to corruption.

Hi again. Jack's solution might work. Beware don't try this on a fast CD! See if you can find an old 8 spin or lower.

Don't know how important the files you are trying to recover are to you, but if you do not have a backup of the files then they are not that critical to begin with. I honestly will not waste the time and effort to salvage data from a snapped disc. -- Always do what you are afraid to do --