Mac Love with CD recovery

Our babysitter gave us a CD of pictures of our children, but the CD was scratched.  And our babysitter has shipped off to join the Navy, so realistically there is no way of getting another one burned until later this year.

So I tried some CD recovery.  Of course I Googled for it but the best result was for a product called AnyReader, which was Windows only.  I tried it, and it hung and got stuck and recovered only the first 5 files or so (which were easily read by the OS).

So after some more Googling, I found a way to do this on my Mac.  Here's what I did:

• Installed Darwinports from http://darwinports.com
  
• Installed ddrescue from http://ddrescue.darwinports.com/
  
• Identified the mount point of the cd with:  $ mount
• You can also find this information with: $ sudo dmesg
• Unmounted the CD with:  $ sudo umount /dev/disk5s0
• Ran ddrescue with: $ ddrescue -v -b 2048 /dev/disk5s0 diskimage.dmg logfile

Prior to getting it to work, I did have to kill the Finder copy going on, which was just kill -9 pid where pid was the process ID for the Finder process itself.  If you use top -u -s10 you can see the process, or I generally use ps -ax | grep Finder which shows the Finder process and your grep request

Then I went to sleep.  And I woke the next morning to find a mostly recovered CD.  I was very pleased with the results.

My Mac rocks!