How to recover data from a defective CDROM

[Jonathan Ryshpan]

My computer is no longer able to read a CDROM with some fairly valuable
data.  I have been able to read this CDROM successfully in the past.

Inserting the CDROM into the drive produces this in /var/log/message:

May 20 14:31:05 localhost kernel: sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
May 20 14:31:05 localhost kernel: sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] Sense Key : Hardware Error [current] 
May 20 14:31:05 localhost kernel: sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Timeout on logical unit
May 20 14:31:05 localhost kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 0
May 20 14:31:05 localhost kernel: __ratelimit: 10 callbacks suppressed
May 20 14:31:05 localhost kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 0
May 20 14:33:02 localhost kernel: sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
May 20 14:33:02 localhost kernel: sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] Sense Key : Hardware Error [current] 
May 20 14:33:02 localhost kernel: sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Timeout on logical unit
May 20 14:33:02 localhost kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 0
May 20 14:33:02 localhost kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 0
May 20 14:33:02 localhost kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 1
May 20 14:33:02 localhost kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 2
May 20 14:33:02 localhost kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 3

An attempt to get some data using cat fails:
# cat /dev/sr0
cat: /dev/sr0: Input/output error

Thanks - jon