I have used the following programs below to recover data from CD, CD-R and CD-RW discs. These programs will also recover data from DVD discs.

1. CD/DVD Diagnostic 3.0

2. DVD Data Rescue® v3.0

3. CD Data Rescue® v2.6

4. isobuster

5. CDRoller

One time I had a CD-RW disc that I used to store files on using InCD from the NERO Burning ROM program. My system crashed and had to be reinstalled. When I installed the newer version of NERO  that had a newer version of InCD I could not access the files on my CD-RW because the CD-RW disc had not been closed out. I did not want to reinstall the old version of NERO Burning ROM  just to access my files on the CD-RW disc. I used CD/DVD Diagnostic to recover all my files off of the CD-RW disc and it recovered every single file without any problems. Out of all the programs I tried to use to recover the files from my CD-RW disc CD/DVD Diagnostic was the only one that was able to read and recover the files from my CD-RW disc.

For information on How CDs Work look at the following article from http://www.howstuffworks.com title How CDs Work.

For more information of CD-R discs view the CD-R information on Wikipedia

For more information of CD-RW discs view the CD-RW information on Wikipedia

For more information of DVD discs view the DVD information on Wikipedia

I suggest you search the HowStuffWorks website for more info about CD, CD-R,CD-RW and DVD discs.