Recover data from a quick- erased CDRW/DVDRW disc

Procedure used to recover data from a quick-erased CD/DVD-RW disc
1. Make a file of exactly the size of the cd/dvdrw disc's capacity.
(this step may not be needed)
2. With Nero I created a new project and added the file to it so that I have the disc filled. I gues you can also fill up the disc with other files.
The reason why I fill the disc is because I want Nero to make a session that uses the entire disc. Like I wrote earlier in this thread I experienced that my CD/DVD-Drive refuses to read off the disc beyond the session's boundaries. When you quick-erase a disc there is no session anymore so the drive will not read at all. Burning a new session will overwrite the data and burning only a small session will NOT make the drive read the other data that is still on the disc.
The reason why I used the one big file is so that I could later on recognize which part of the disc was overwritten by this file because this file contained all zeros (0 x00).
3. I pressed burn and selected disc-at-once. Then while Nero was burning the leadin I pressed cancel. My CD/DVD-Drive finished writing the lead-in and Nero reported an error.
This is what was accomplished however: Now the disc contains a session that says that the used disc size is the complete disc. Nero did not get to writing file because I cancelled it. Good thing because I don't want Nero to write any files because my old data will get overwritten!
I gues it works the same with different writing software. Another method that I used during a test was simply press the reset button of the computer when the burning software was done with writing the lead-in and started with the files.
4. I had to restart the computer after cancelling burning.
With the cdrw disc inserted I saw in "my computer" that windows recognized that the disc was 650MB, clicking on it gave an error. Good so far!
Now with IsoBuster you can extract the sectors from a disc to a file. This is what I did.
I gues that if you have data- recovery software at this point it will be usefull because now (if all went well;)) the CD/DVD-Drive WILL read data from the entire disc. Anyway, I used ISO-Buster because the files that I needed to recover where a bit odd for nowadays (.XM,.S3 M,.MP3):
In IsoBuster I had to do several steps:
Step 1: Find out from and to which sector the drive will read
By choosing "Sector View" you can look at any given sector.
Here I found out what the first and the last sectors where that are readable. (Hint I used the method for the old game: "Gues a number below 100, I'll tell if it is higher or lower than what you gues")
Step 2: Extract the actual sectors
By choosing "Extract From-To" you can extract any given range of sectors to a file. My disc was a data-disc so I choose the first extraction type "User data, 2048 bytes/block...".
In the end I got a.tao file which was about 650MB. I ran several programs on it to look for files inside a file by searching for file-header-paterns:
1 . Multi Ripper 2.80 (for DOS, for the.XM files. It does many other file formats as well (jpg,png, bmp,wav,etc,etc +100 ). Try google with this query: Multi Ripper 2.80. I still had the file from good old days but I saw several good search results)
2 . Winamp for mp3.
Winamp will scan any file when you give it the extension.mp3 and play it as one big song (so I renamed the.tao file to.mp3 ). I used the discwriter to get a.wav and the Adobe Audition to manually cut and save my songs. I looked at the MP3 file format and it is hard to find an mp3 file in a big file because it has no clear header just a bunch of mpeg-frames in most cases for me. A lot of my files had no ID3 v2 or ID3 v1 tags... But after a couple of hours I recovered everything.
Finally a list of used stuff:
Software:
- IsoBuster v1.9 and above
- Nero 6.8 and above
- Multi Ripper 2.80 and above
- WinAmp v5.02 and above
- Windows XP Pro NL (patched up)
Hardware:
- NEC DVDRW ND1300 A 1.06
Disc:
- some old 4 speed CDRW/DVDRW

How to recover MOST of scratched CD/DVD data discs

For dvd do the same thing as that in cd
I learn an old thecnique to how to recover damaged or scratched disks
with some lost of data. In this case i have one borrowed game - MAX PAYNE 2
with a chunck of 4 mb lost with a scratch in CD1 Install. Here we cover some
special thecniques of how to create a full working CD from the scratched one.
First some tools will be needed:
1 . Alcohol 120%
2. UltraISO
3 . Windows XP/2000
3. Small piece of cotton
4. Dry cleaner paper
5. Finally, oil for cooking.
First step - preparing the CD
Get the cotton and drop some water, start cleaning vertically the surface of CD.
Do it 3 times and dry the water with a piece of dry cleaner paper. With a new piece
of cotton, drop some oil for cooking and start to wet the surface like you are
washing the CD with the oil. Dry carefully now. Some particles of oil will stay on the
microsurface of the scrath. It's okay. Seems the oil helps the laser of the CD/DVD driver
to read the surface again. Sure this will work with small unreadable scratchs - some hard
scratchs loose parts of the surface of the CD where we have data and it's lost forever.
But if it is loosed try anyway. Whith this tip 80% of the small scratched CD's coud be
recovered.
Second Step - testing the CD
With Alcohol 120% make an ISO - image making wizard - and lets see if the app can
read the loosed surface. In my case Alcohol 120 % had recovered 60% of the data.
This is not enough. Have tryed other appz, they do not recover all the data. But the
CD/DVD driver laser CAN recover all data in this case. the data is still there, what we do?
third step - making the new CD
With the main copy system of windows explorer you can do it. Just create one folder
with the same name of the CD label for future burn reference, and copy the CD content
to the folder. When the CD copy process find the scratch, in majority of the cases, it's
slow down the reading and will recover ALL loosed data.If not, it just tell you there's
an unreadable sector. In this case your CD is lost. But it's not my case, finally
windows explorer got all the data from the scratch and made a copy in the folder.
with the ultraISO, wrote the original CD label, drop the content of the folder and
save as Iso. You can Test the new CD just mounting the iso in the Alcohol 120%. In my
case i did ISO of the two discs from MAX PAYNE 2 and tested installing from the mounted
ISO. Works like a charm. I got the 4 mb lost again. So, I have burned the CD and now i
have a working copy from the scratched one.
Sounds too bizzarre, but works. Course you can jump the cleaning process and try to copy
the content with Windows explorer. But in my case did not work without oil...

Information Gathering using Firefox

The First and foremost step in hacking would be the " Information Gathering ", many of them use various different Tools for the network Reconnaissance, but here is a trick that reveals you how to gather Information about the target system just by using a Browser "Firefox". The Information Gathering includes the following basics,.... Domain name and IP address
Open Ports
Daemon Banner Grabbing
OS Finger Printing
Server name and Type Well, Domain name is the prime thing that you need, at least to identify the target, obtaining the IP address can be done just by pinging. For the Open port detection, you might better go for third party tools and once the open ports are obtained you can use the telnet for the Daemon Banner grabbing, to know what the actual process thats running on the port along with its version info, so that you can easily launch an exploit to compromise the security if the daemon running on the target is a vulnerable one. Here comes the real tough part " OS Fingerprinting ", most of them use 'Nmap' for obtaining OS info and also it is the right choice for doing so. " Whois " - database will reveal what type of server is running on the target machine, but you can find it out just by using Firefox. You can really launch hell a lot of exploits if you know the server type on the target machine, and if it is IIS 6.0 or lesser, then it would make the task easier. Open up the Firefox browser, and browse the target website just like a legitimate user, and once done with it open up a new tab (CTRL + T) and close the previous tab, type "about:cache" in the URL and hit enter and it will list you the following... Memory cache device
Disk cache device
Offline cache device
Down below the "Disk cache device" click on the link that says " List Cache Entries ",
there you can see a brief history of the sites that you visited. Click on your target site's link and it will display you the server type along with its version in a clear text, also you ca find the packet Header, Request method whether it is a Post or Get.
and down below you can analyze the payload of the datagram shown in hexa- decimal values.
This part is real interesting and looks similar to a Sniffer. Now you got the server type and its version, and now you can launch exploits according to the version.