Can a quick erased rewritable disc be undeleted?

[dbminter]

I was thinking about it and a question occurred to me.

 

 

When ImgBurn Quick Erases a rewritable disc, it basically just deletes the TOC, right?  So the disc can be reused.  But, the data is still actually present on the disc, right?  So, can a Quick Erased rewritable disc be undeleted?  Can the contents be recovered from the disc as long as no other writes are made to the disc after a Quick Erase is performed?  Can a deleted TOC be recovered?  And, if it can't, does that make the data on the disc inaccessible?  Or are there methods of recovering the data, but they're just not easy? 

[LIGHTNING UK!]

This could depend on the media being used.

 

For DVD+RW/BD-RE media, the quick erase just makes ImgBurn write zeros to the first few hundred sectors. That just wipes out the file system. You could read the remaining sectors and still access the data, but without the file system, you have no fool proof way of knowing where files start/end (or their names etc).

 

For everything else, the quick erase wipes out the TOC. This is a drive function. You won't be able to read anything on the disc because the drive will see it as being empty and the read commands will simply fail. No idea about TOC recovery... I doubt it though.