No, no writing on the CD at all.  Under a jewelers microscope I can see very slight scratches on the surface but that is all and not visible to the naked eye.  The rest is too small to see.

I have cleaned the laser lens in my burner, an Atapi DVD Dual 8x4x12 which I have believed is a pretty decent one.  That did not help at all.

What surprised me was the recovery software I downloaded and used was able to pick up a few small files which the player could not display cleanly.   Something at least was recoverable that way but most was not.  It took another burner/reader to get the stuff to my memory stick and then to the hd's.