The hospital gave you a CD and it will not open. What to do

What is actually on the disc

You leave radiology with a CD in your hand. You get home, put it in the computer and nothing happens. Or worse: a ten-year-old program opens and hangs on the loading screen.

It is so common it is practically the norm. And the good news is that the problem is the software on the disc, not your images.

The layout of those discs is standardised. It is set by IHE's Portable Data for Imaging (PDI) profile, which is what hospitals follow when they burn them, and which requires two specific things: DICOM files must not sit in the root directory, and a DICOMDIR index must reference all of them.

So what you will find is this:

• A DICOM or IMAGES folder with your real images.
• A DICOMDIR in the root, which is only the index.
• Usually an .exe with the manufacturer's viewer, and an autorun.inf.

The images are in DICOM, the medical imaging standard. There are usually hundreds of files, one per slice, and often with no extension at all: you will see names like IM_0001 or I0000001. That is normal and does not mean they are broken.

If you already copied the folder, you do not need to read any further: drop it here and it opens.

Why the viewer will not start

Four reasons, and none of them is your images:

The program is old. Many bundled viewers were built for Windows XP or 7 and fall over on Windows 10 and 11. This is the most common cause.

You are on a Mac. An .exe simply cannot run on macOS, and Preview has no idea what a DICOM file is.

Your computer has no drive. Most laptops stopped shipping with one years ago, and a cheap USB drive adds another point of failure.

It does not launch itself. This one is worth correcting because it circulates wrongly: Windows has not disabled autorun for CDs. The Microsoft update that restricted it (KB971029) removed it from USB sticks and other removable media, but kept it for CD and DVD. What did change is that Windows now shows you a prompt to decide, instead of running the program outright. If you never see that prompt, or dismiss it by accident, the disc looks like it is doing nothing.

In all four cases your images are perfectly fine. What fails is the wrapper.

How to see them without installing anything

1. Copy the DICOM (or IMAGES) folder from the disc to your desktop. CDs read slowly and plenty arrive already scratched.
2. Open the online DICOM viewer.
3. Drag in the whole folder, or the ZIP if you downloaded it from a hospital portal.

It opens in your browser and the files never leave your computer. It works the same on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone — which is exactly what an .exe cannot do.

If you get an error, the DICOM validator tells you in one line what is wrong: whether the file is not DICOM, is damaged, or uses a compression the browser cannot read.

Keep a copy you can still open in ten years

This is the part people thank themselves for later. CDs scratch, and laptops stopped shipping with drives years ago.

• Copy the DICOM folder to an external drive or to cloud storage. That is the original and it is what any doctor will ask for.
• Also export the images that matter to JPG or to a PDF so you can show them without special tools.

Bear in mind that JPG and PDF are flat copies: good for sharing, not a replacement for the original file.

Before you share it with anyone

Your DICOM files carry your name, your patient identifier, your date of birth and the hospital inside their metadata. If you are sending the study to a doctor at another centre, to an insurer or to a forum, look at it first with the metadata viewer and strip it with the anonymiser.

And if what you cannot follow is the report

Opening the images is one thing. Understanding what the report says is another, and it is usually the part that actually worries people. That is what ExplainMyScan is for: upload the study, say what concerns you, and get an explanation in plain language.