Long shot. Is this even possible?

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I'm very sorry to hear about your brother. The disk might be a format that Windows doesn't recognize when it tries to open it. That or the CD might be broken. The likeliest use of a backup emacs CD would be to install emacs, and perhaps the configuration files for emacs/linux (frequently called "dotfiles"). Given that this is a CD, it's unlikely that it would contain up-to-date journal entries, since CDs are not really suitable for "live backups" (they're more for cold backups). It is possible that org-mode could be used as a journal, and that your brother would have saved backups of a journal from long ago on there, but I doubt that it would be current information. Very likely that anything of that nature would be saved on local HDD, unless your brother still used CDs for a lot of things, or was peculiar about having backups in that specific format for some reason.

Sorry for your loss. There's a good chance that something labelled "emacs backup" is nothing more than a copy of Emacs and his configuration, without any personal data. It's impossible to know either way, of course, but I would be prepared for that possibility. I expect that the problem "the disk is unreadable" is probably not related *directly* to Emacs. The data on the disk might be in some backup format which requires a specific program to read it, for instance (purely a guess, though). It might be worth talking to a data backup service. Good luck.

Could be formatted with a Linux or other file system or similar that your OS doesn’t know how to read.

Really sorry to hear this. Hang in there. Others have indicated that the CD likely won't be helpful to you. Even so, you might feel that you'd like to at least see what it contains. I'm guessing there's some place you can take it, to extract the info from it. Hope someone here or elsewhere can help you find that.

I am skilled at data recovery. If you create an "ISO" file of the CD (Google how to do this) and send that ISO file to me, I would be happy to look at it and recover what I can. (email it to my-user-name-in-lowercase at my-user-name dot com) That said, don't get your hopes up. As others have said, I wouldn't expect something labeled "emacs backup" to contain much in the way of personal files. Also, the dyes used in CDs that can be burned in consumer CD burners wear out over time, making the CD unreadable (in which case the ISO would just be gibberish). But I understand your desperation--If there's a chance data on the CD will be helpful to you, I'm willing to help you check it to be sure.

Data CD's are pretty much exclusively used with some extension of ISO9660, 99% of the time Rock Ridge. That ought to be readable from nearly anything that supports a CD drive. It could also be UDF, but again, any modern machine could read it. Optical media doesn't use the same sort of filesystems used on electromechanical and solid state media.

Sorry for your loss. Echoing what others have said, if the CD did contain a backup of his Emacs configuration, it's not something that will provide much, if any, insight into your brother's personal life. It's just configuration code. (There is the possibility that the CD is mislabeled or labelled to obfuscate something more private, but this is another long shot.) That said, given your brother used Emacs and made physical backups, he likely also made remote backups — not just of his code but possibly more personal things. Do you have access to his computer or email?

Some disk drives are better than others at reading CD / DVD data disks. For example, I have a few 2009 Mac Pro desktop computers that have CD / DVD optical drives built-in that sometimes cannot read data disks that are sent to me from various sources. My laptops from that era (2009 - 2011) do a much better job at reading those disks that are unreadable by the desktop computers. So, don't assume that the disk is completely unreadable. Try a few different computers and laptops with disk drives ... and, remember, that you may need to use a file explorer to navigate the disk (don't assume that it will magically open into a graphical interactive program with user-options neatly displayed on screen). In addition, there is also an option to choose which format when burning a CD / DVD; e.g., Mac only, Windows only, or both Mac and Windows. So, maybe the disk was only burned for one of those, instead of both of them. In addition, try cleaning the disk with a cotton cloth, but no chemicals.

My heart is with you. Emacs is primarily used as a text editor for documents and programming code. The CD may contain just stuff related to the editor itself (the 'configuration' file that makes Emacs work how the owner wants it to) or it may indeed contain files made with Emacs (which would be what you would be interested in). Installing Emacs on your computer won't help with the problem of the CD not being readable. The solution is more about making it 'mountable' or readable by the computer you stick it into. As mentioned, making a copy of it and sending it to a data recovery skilled person may be a good move.

Sorry for your loss, I hope you'll find the closure you need.

Sorry for your loss man. First assess the CD surface, see if it's scratched / spoiled (humidity may alter the material inside) If it looks clean then it's just a matter of data format, do you remember what computer he used ? something with windows on it ? macos ? linux ? Take care :brohug:

While I think it's very nice of you to offer your expertise to help a stranger, I also think op should carefully consider if they want to send their brother's maybe personal data to someone they don't know.

I'm sorry for your loss. I'd suggest hunting through his computer - with the caveat that you might not want to see everything on there, of course - for folders containing a hidden .git folder. His programming work will likely have that. If you find any, talk to us or the people over at /r/git and we can see if your brother's code can be retrieved for posterity.

Gonna be honest, anything burned to a CD-R is probably quite old at this point. More importantly: anything related to Emacs is going to be very mundane and probably not worth the time to recover. At *best*, you may find some old email passwords in there. Don't go in expecting to find hidden manuscripts -- anything like that will typically be on the computer itself. All text files saved by Emacs can be opened in Notepad just fine, too, so don't agonize over figuring out how to use Emacs to open files (I say this because Emacs is notorious for being difficult to master).

This was my first thought, followed closely by "it's easy enough to `dd` an ISO then mount it loopback in Linux." It's my standard procedure for any external media any more, just due to unreliability of physical media and how big storage has become. It's precisely what I did with our mother's netbook, CD's, and 3.5in floppies when she passed. No idea how to do it in Windows, but I suspect half the problem is that last I checked, Windows is pretty limited in number of filesystems it recognizes.

This is a very good point, and something OP should consider. (You should also have this concern when taking your PC to a repair shop, but lots of folks don't think about it then either.)

You don't even need the fanciness of `dd`, plain ol' `cat` will work just fine. But yeah, it's been too many years since I've used Windows to remember how to do it on Windows (and even if I did remember, I'm sure it's changed since then); so that's why I said to Google it. And yep, `mount -o loop` would be one of the first things tried. Best-case, that's all I need to do. Medium-case I have to rebuild a few unreadable regions. Worst-case I give up on structured data and just run `strings` as a last-ditch effort to find something of meaning.

Thank you for this. I think formatting IS an issue because his laptop is a Mac and I have Windows. Now I'm looking into buying a refurbished Mac Mini or creating a Hackintosh with an old, unused PC I have. I need to stay off Google, is what I need to do.

Man, I appreciate you guys. Everything you just posted it Greek to me. I'm definitely over my head trying to figure this stuff out. My mom will be taking his MacBook into a shop, eventually; so maybe I should just show her the CD, too.

Oh, now I just found something called MacDrive. Only $50. I can spare that.

Mac probably uses something interoperable with Windows. Either way, I wouldn't advise to spend much resources on this. It being a CD and not a DVDR probably puts it at 10+ years old. There's a very big chance it won't work. Getting files off his personal PC is probably the right idea.