So, I've got these old CDs I burned in 2000, circa. And, of course, I am having troubles in reading today. I tried to read them with 4 different optic readers of various kinds (all of them DVD or DB readers/writers) with the same identical results in all.
Some CDs I can't read at all. For others, I can "see" the CD content and I can even navigate the few parts I tried to, but as I copy them, it takes forever and then I am returned some error, and the copy process fails.

Do you guys think there's something else I could try?

I've found that burned CDs don't have a great shelf life, typically less than 10 years.

The old Plextor CD drives were really good at reading last-gasp CDs, I used to have one around for this purpose.

Back in my audio CD ripping days there were certain make/model CD drives that had much lower initial error rates and fewer retries needed to capture the audio track error free. I kept a pair of these drives in a tower computer specifically for this reason. PATA interface drives, as I recall.

The software I used would report how many initial errors were encountered during a given CD rip and how many re-reads were performed. Often the initial error count was zero across the entire disc, which made for rather quick rips, allowing me to barely get out of my chair before being able to insert the next disc.

Of course, now I cannot recall which specific drive model those were. Plextor certainly rings a bell, but which specific model(s) escapes me.

Perhaps a search for a CD (not DVD) drive that has an excellent reputation for CD ripping may also do well at reading degraded CD-R discs. Then again, reading old CD-R discs probably has its own Internet interest groups.

Thanks guys.

After some further research, I am trying CDRoller. Well, I tested the trial version which reported that one of my failing CDs was in fact recoverable (it took a very, very long time to read). Unfortunately I need to purchase the software to actually pull put data form the CD, but, assuming it is telling the truth, it may be worth the expense ($ 40 for data I somewhat care about).
I am now testing the other unreadable CDs before making a decision.

I would guess there's some free alternative out there, actually.

CD readers: back in the days, I actually had few SCSI plextor readers, which had a stellar reputation. Using them now is not that trivial. I'd have to dig out or buy a SCSI controller for those.

Whatever extraction software you use, it will have an advantage if the CD drive is providing the best quality data read possible.

Using an older model PATA Plextor drive may work well if the extraction software can work optimally through a USB to PATA adaptor.

I happen to keep an old-school Dell laptop docking station on hand for this sort of thing. The docking station has a PATA bus inside and a PCI bus with two slots. Plus the matching ancient laptop, of course.

When push comes to shove sometimes one needs to utilize old hardware to solve a problem.

Seve Gibson's "Spinrite" program can work miracles in data recovery, but I don't know if it will work on a CD. Probably not, since the way it works is to find and correct errors on hard drives. I used to use it back in the days of floppy drives.

tanstaafl.

DDRescue might help. It runs like the *nix DD program so it reads everything and tries to make an ISO image of the disk.
https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/

It should be available in the repositories of just about any Linux distro or you can download it from their site.

hth

There's not much special about dd versus any other single pass copy program, like cp or even cat.

Not sure which kind of CDs we are discussing here: CD-DA (audio), or CD-ROM (data)? For the former (CD-DA), the gold standard is the cdparanoia ripper. For the latter (CD-ROM), you're mostly at the mercy of the on-drive firmware rather than any particular bit of external software.

Cheers

CD-ROM.

CDRoller seems to be slowly progressing. It recovered 10% of one of the CDs in almost 24Hrs. The good thing is that that 10% was in fact not accessible otherwise.
The bad thing is that a 10-day "extraction" process seems somewhat troubling to me. Still, I am inclined to let it go. Maybe speed will increase?

Thanks for all the recommendations guys.

Is this a desktop class DVD drive or something built into a laptop? This sort of continuous reading and retry may cause wear and stress on the drive.

If you can source a top grade desktop style CD drive you may find the process not only runs less slowly but may well recover a higher percentage of the data. The optics of the drive can have a significant impact on the raw track data recovery rate.

You should try reading them with an old CD only reader. The beam will be twice the size of the DVD reader and may be able to detect the written areas better.

Not sure how true it is for CD-ROM, but certainly for CD-Audio you can do a lot better at the SCSI or MMC level than you can at the block level (where "dd" and "ddrescue" operate), because some drives are capable of telling you which bytes in the sector it failed to read, rather than just whether the whole sector is good or not. If you've got several iffy bits in the same sector, that facility makes it much easier to assemble one correct read out of several partially-correct ones.

Peter

So, it turns out that CDRoller managed to read 560MB out of 640MB, and counting, as of this morning when I left home. So, it got faster at some point (possibly surface was not as "damaged" as the laser kept travelling towards the edge). It may be done by the time I get back home. This is CD 1 of 5, so I am starting to be more hopeful.

Larry, unfortunately I do not have a CD reader anymore. Or, more precisely, I still own my SCSI Plextors (I had one reader and one burner left since), and I should have my SCSI controller in my hardware archives, but I don't think it will fit in my current motherboard, not to mention drivers, etc. I may resort to that at some point, if all else fails.

K447, I tested these CDs on 3 different desktop class readers (one DVD burners and two BDs), and two different laptop class devices (one of which is actually an external, USB3 BD reader), with same results.
CDRoller is now working on my desktop, reading from a DVD burner.

Also, as a side note, in my past experience, I noticed more than once how DVD readers would manage to read old CDs better than CD readers. Not sure if this is an exception or a common phenomenon, but my guess has been that the thinner laser beam of more modern devices would be beneficial on older CDs due to its higher reading resolution.
I have never read actual literature on this, though, so maybe you're correct Larry.

ok, just to update you guys, I almost entirely recovered one of the 5 CDs. I had to restart the process because I needed to shut down my PC for other reasons, and now it is recovering it again.

The other four, no luck. They can't seem to be read at all. I can tell CDRoller to try to recover regardless by providing some info (joliet, single/multi session, etc.) which I do have, but I have not had time to give it a try.

... and, I realized I have a SATA Plextor CD burner that I have not tried yet. That is something I need to try as that unit did turn out to be pretty good in the past in reading data CDs with issues, even though not THIS damaged. We'll see...