I need help reading the second track of a .mdf/.mds file

I have some CDs that have pictures on them. My mom created them a very long time ago with whatever software she happened to be using at the time. These CDs have two tracks. I can see that both tracks exist in Alcohol 120%, sometimes the second track is a lot bigger than the first one.

Whenever I mount the .mdf/.mds file, only one drive is shown. I can explore what is presumably the first track without issue. I cannot seem to access the second track.

I tried mounting the .mdf/.mds file as a virtual DVD/CD-ROM, then go into the image making wizard, select the second track, then make an .mdf/mds file with from that. The resulting .mdf/.mds file still has two tracks though, and if I try to mount that resulting .mdf/.mds file, it completely crashes Alcohol 120%.

Any help or tips for helping me read the second track would be much appreciated, thank you!

Why two tracks? What is the second one supposed to contain?

 

 

I tried mounting the .mdf/.mds file as a virtual DVD/CD-ROM, then go into the image making wizard, select the second track, then make an .mdf/mds file with from that. The resulting .mdf/.mds file still has two tracks though, and if I try to mount that resulting .mdf/.mds file, it completely crashes Alcohol 120%.

Perhaps the second track is somehow corrupted. I suppose your mom isn't alive anymore, she could give some information. With what program did she burned these CDs, if Alcohol which version (it might helped if you used the same one)? Was she able to access the second track (perhaps on an older version of Windows)? Without these answers we can't help you much.

I don't know what the second track is supposed to contain. My mom is alive, but she doesn't remember how she burned these CDs. These CDs were made almost 20 years ago. Does Alcohol 120% give me the ability to dump the raw contents of the track?

Is there a way for me to dump the raw binary data for the track somewhere so I could poke around with it more? I know the Sector has a "save sector" button but it looks like each sector is about 1 kilobyte. Some of these tracks are 40 megabytes. I really don't want to press the "Save sector" button 40,000 times.

The mdf/mds file contains the binary data (the mdf file is a precise 1:1 image of the disc), yet I don't know if you can do something with them. Perhaps you should use a file recovery tool like IsoBuster (not free) or any other equivalent.

Turns out I was overthinking it. I'm writing this here to help anyone who might be having the same questions and happen upon this thread in the future.

The multiple tracks seem to get "combined" when mounted. In my case my CD had two tracks. One track was 30MB and the second track was 35MB. When plugging my CD into my computer, the CD had 65MB worth of pictures on it. When mounting the CD dump (mdf/mds) files with Alcohol 120%, the mounted volume had 65MB of pictures.

When I used an iso creation tool (not Alcohol 120%) to copy my disk, it only copied the first track. The ISO was 30MB and only contained half of the images.

So, I just mounted the mdf/mds file and copied the data off, and that got both tracks worth of data. Since I'm just grabbing files, I don't need to worry about a "perfect byte-for-byte copy" of my CD, I just need the files.

ISO format can contain only one track of data, it isn't suitable for multisession discs.

So if I understand correctly you expected to see the two tracks separated when using the CD or the mds/mdf image. Well, that is simply wrong, the disc is always presented as one entity regarding its content of files.

Most probably such CD's have been written in multiple sessions separately, some files in each session, and last filesystem points to files of both sessions, that's why the total size of the files is the sum of the size of these two sessions. It's usually not a good idea to use CD duplication software like Alcohol to backup disc's written in multiple sessions, it's better to just copy files and create a new single session disc with them.