I learn an old thecnique to how to recover damaged or scratched disks
with some lost of data. In this case i have one borrowed game - MAX PAYNE 2
with a chunck of 4 mb lost with a scratch in CD1 Install. Here we cover some
special thecniques of how to create a full working CD from the scratched one.

First some tools will be needed:

1. Alcohol 120%
2. UltraISO
3. Windows XP/2000 (not tested on 95/98/me)
3. Small piece of cotton
4. Dry cleaner paper

First step - preparing the CD

Get the cotton and drop some water, start cleaning vertically the surface of CD.
Do it 3 times and dry the water with a piece of dry cleaner paper. With a new piece
of cotton, drop some oil for cooking and start to wet the surface like you are
washing the CD with the oil. Dry carefully now. Some particles of oil will stay on the
microsurface of the scrath. It's okay. Seems the oil helps the laser of the CD/DVD driver
to read the surface again. Sure this will work with small unreadable scratchs - some hard
scratchs loose parts of the surface of the CD where we have data and it's lost forever.
But if it is loosed try anyway. Whith this tip 80% of the small scratched CD's coud be
recovered.

Second Step - testing the CD

With Alcohol 120% make an ISO - image making wizard - and lets see if the app can
read the loosed surface. In my case Alcohol 120% had recovered 60% of the data.
This is not enough. Have tryed other appz, they do not recover all the data. But the
CD/DVD driver laser CAN recover all data in this case. the data is still there, what we do?

third step - making the new CD

With the main copy system of windows explorer you can do it. Just create one folder
with the same name of the CD label for future burn reference, and copy the CD content
to the folder. When the CD copy process find the scratch, in majority of the cases, it's
slow down the reading and will recover ALL loosed data.If not, it just tell you there's
an unreadable sector. In this case your CD is lost. But it's not my case, finally
windows explorer got all the data from the scratch and made a copy in the folder.
with the ultraISO, wrote the original CD label, drop the content of the folder and
save as Iso. You can Test the new CD just mounting the iso in the Alcohol 120%. In my
case i did ISO of the two discs from MAX PAYNE 2 and tested installing from the mounted
ISO. Works like a charm. I got the 4 mb lost again. So, I have burned the CD and now i
have a working copy from the scratched one.

Sounds too bizzarre, but works. Course you can jump the cleaning process and try to copy
the content with Windows explorer. But in my case did not work without oil...smile2.gif

Any comments are welcome.

 

 

 

Reply

that's cool. i wish i knew of it when i had those old disks i was trying to recover. though for most of my defective dvds/cds,i found badcopy pro to be able to recover most of it. works for zip/flash drives as well.

Reply

One thing you need to know about CD & DVD's the data are close to the label side and for DVD's (2 sided ones) close to the foil in the center.

A CD even one with deep surface scratches can be restored and read. If the scratch is on the label side the data may be unrecoverable. The laser beam goes through the clear plastic and bounces back from the foil layer (close to label surface) and is reflected back to the optical eye. With scratches in the surface the laserbeam may be deflected to much to read that particular sector and you get a skip or data read error.

The trick with the oil on a clean cd is restoring the surface integrity so the laser beam go in a straight line and will reflect back to the optical eye. There are tools and utilities out there that can be used to restore the surface area on a CD. Most of them are plastic restore and polishing compunds invented for the automotice industry and when sold for CD restoring you get the same product in a tiny can / spray bottle for 4 times the cost of the same product sold to restore plastic on the car. I'm going to list one company that started with products for cars and they are sold for all plastic applications Plastic_Polish

This is a way to do this with products you can pick up in a jevelery store (emery cloth) and automotive store (plastic restore polish):
So using emery paper (Only do this on CD's you don't care about until you figure out how to do this) to remove part of the surface you will end up with a cloudy surface, looks like its destroyed but when applying the surface material (Plastic restore polish) the cd will come back clear and ready to use.

You need to polish and remove surface you have to have a tool that spin the CD for you, straight scratches will make it that more difficult to fix the cd.

If you have a one of a kind CD that you need restored there are a few companies out there that will do that for you. (cost to be determined by the quantity of disks you need to restore)

Nils

 

 

 

Reply

Nice trick. I wish I knew that earlier. I threw away a lot of spoilt CD's. But I am not sure if they were scratched. Do you know about this liquid formation on CD's? Like droplets and they stink. What to do about that?

Reply

i dont like that alcohol program because it can't copy some copyrighted disks still which i would like copys of....

Reply

Hmm i didnt know u were able to do that.. a well i dont use CDs anymore, i prefere putting my documents online

Reply

That is really cool, aweseome thingy you have here, you get a reputation point, that relly is an amazing guide! Cool, you must know alot about CD's, do you manufacture them. lol just joking. But really that's even more help!
what about games though or like stuff?

Reply

Hmm, interesting technique, bigboss. I saw an article like that some place on the internet, but I didn't feel like reading it. Now I know all about it. Thanks!

By the way, PHPtech, welcome to trap17.

Reply

Nice little tutorial

Reply

An easier and less-costly way is to take some toothpaste, the non crystalized kind (like crest and aquafresh) and rub it in a deep scratch. Just take a soft cloth and wipe it off. Then clean it with some Windex or other glass cleaner and wa la, data recovery ^.^

Reply