I've decided to re-rip my CD collection, to ensure that I also have a copy of my music in FLAC format.

Unfortunately, some of my CDs are a little bit scratched, and some of the tracks won't rip properly.

Any suggestions? Can I smear them with (I don't know) jam or something to get a good read this once?

(Obviously, I'm kidding about the jam)

That depends on the flavor involved...

There are scratch remover solutions out there, but I have never personally tried them. I would think that any of them would work for a single reading. Also, check with an optician - the same solution they use for treating scratches in eyeglasses should work very well for CDs.

I've heard toothpast suggested before, but I have never tried it myself. Remember that the data is on the label side of the disk, if the scratch is on the top theres nothing you can do, the data will have gone!

I borrow plenty of CDs from the public library, and some CDs look like they've been used for testing sandpaper...
Most can be helped along enough to rip properly with a coat or two of non-polishing car wax (I typically use Sonax "hard wax, art# 301100-540"). Where that isn't enough I use a car polish (again Sonax, don't have the bottle/art# handy) that cuts somewhat, but not as heavy as a rubbing compound.

A colleague bought a CD polishing machine and said it worked very well, although I think he was only using it to play CDs in a player. I think it was like this one:

http://www.pc-food.co.uk/storage/default.asp?ProdCatID=122

The other option is to try ripping from a different drive - some seem to be more tolerant than others.

Gareth

Most of the commercial products are either optical-equivalent patching compounds or polishers. Obviously, you'd have to buy something to get optical equivalence. So you're left with polishers. The polishers I've used don't even require that the disc be unscratched afterwards. You just need to get rid of severe radial scratches. Most of them still appear as if you've gone after them with steel wool afterwards. (And, yes, they do work, or at least make the CD work better.) So you could find a polising agent around the house. Maybe some metal cleaner like Brasso? (I suppose any petroleum products might dissolve the plastic, though, which is probably a bad thing.) Toothpaste makes sense. Maybe a baking soda paste? I've also heard peanut butter.

You might want to scratch a crap CD (do you get AOL ones in the mail over there?) and test any method out first before completely ruining a hard-to-replace CD.

First question: Are the scratches on the top of the CD (where the labeling is) or on the bottom of the CD (where the clear plastic is )?

If it's the top layer, you're scrod. Because that's the data layer, and if a scratch there has penetrated the silkscreen print ink and gotten into the actual data substrate, the bits are simply gone. I've had certain rippers like EAC be able to do enough retries and error correction on such discs to get a usable rip, but only if the scratch into the data layer was not severe.

If it's the bottom clear plastic, scratches down there are easy to buff out. When I worked at a jewelry store, I used to use the shop's buffing wheel to buff out the scratches, worked like a charm. These days, big record stores sometimes keep buffing wheels around just for the purpose of doing those kinds of fixes for their customers, so perhaps try some record stores.

You can also get manual hand-crank buffer tools at record stores. I've tried one of these, and it works but it's a real pain to use.

do you get AOL ones in the mail over there

We certainly do. I'm waiting for the first time I open a cereal packet and find an AOL CD...

I think that's already happened over here in the US. My kid gets little games on CD in her cereal boxes, and I think those almost always have an AOL sign-up offer on the CD with the game.

I doubt this actually helps, but when the top side of the cd is scratched in my collection, I’ll take a sharpie and fill in the spots in the foil which are letting light through the cd. This usually will help out EAC to make a more perfect rip.

I used the "Skip Dr.". It is an abrasive wheel device that rubs the scratch out. It is marketed under several names like "Game Dr." and "DVD Dr." but they are all the same product. I used it with great success on CDs. Very deep gouges or scratches on the data layer were not fixable obviously, but this thing worked like a charm. I'd give it one pass and let EAC try to rip again. It may not work on one pass, but you can tell from EAC's report that it got further into the track before failing. Some CDs took quite a few passes, but that 30 dollar device more than earned its value.

Skip Dr. <- I've never dealt with this vender, I'm linking just to show the product.

FWIW, I've repaired CDs with toothpaste and elbow grease -- at least well enough to get them to rip.

Jim

You might also try this which is used by motorcyclists to polish their windshields, which are also polycarbonate.

Jim

I have also used the Skip Dr (the motorized version which is much easier on your arms) and I have to say it is decent but not magic. There are some discs I could not save at all, especially those with deep radial scratching, but in the majority of cases it did fix the problem.

Stay away from the solutions that you just have to rub on, they don't ever work as far as I can tell, buffing the disc is the only way.

And it has been my experience that there is a huge difference between how well different cd drives rip cds. Some drives can read scratched discs much better than others. It pays to try to rip bad discs like this on every cd drive you can find.

I agree with ninti that some drives are a lot better at dealing with scrathes and that radial scratches are a total pain - mostly impossible to fix with the Skip Dr.

I swear there should be a class action lawsuit against some CD player companies... my Ford Focus ate so many of my brand new CDs (all creating radial scratches) and I doubt I'm the only one.

I hope this isn't too radically off topic, but does anyone have any tips to extract raw data from a damaged CD?

My Brother-In-Law scratched through the top layer of several CDs of vacation photos with a ball point pen. (D'oh!) The CDs are pretty much ruined, but I figured it might be possible to reconstruct at least a few photos if I could get any information off the discs.

Hm, makes me wonder if hard drive data recovery software would work on there. Check out runtime.org for Get Data Back (for FAT or NTFS). That has a knack for diging out the FAT table or NFTS MFT and also finding lost data. Worth the buy, too, incase you ever delete a file that you don't have backed up.

What else. The only other undeleter that has worded for me since the DOS days was a demo of R-Studio. Only let me recover a few KB in demo mode, but that's all I needed at the time. I believe it's really expensive, so try GetDataBack first.

Or maybe some drive imaging software could do it. Doesn't Nero have options for "Skip Bad Blocks" (so people can pirate PSX games)? Maybe an option like that would help build an image which you could search off the HDD without the CDRom laser jerking back and forth untill it breaks through the side of your case because it can't read the holes in the disc.

Good luck.

Did your sister know about this disorder before marrying him?

Bruno

Very good suggestions... I appreciate it. Sounds like a serious pain, but she seemed pretty desperate to get any of the images back. From the sound of it, the ToC is hosed to a point that the disc won't even read. I guess I might try using the software listed to get as complete an image as possible and then maybe perform a manual search for image headers? Hmmm... better be some damn good photos.

And on the Brother-In-Law situation... I think she got the better deal. He makes some mean stuffed baked potatoes...

does anyone have any tips to extract raw data from a damaged CD?


I've not tried recovering data from CDs, but this program has done well for me recovering data accidentally erased from a removable media optical hard drive.

tanstaafl.

I stumbled across one today: ISOBuster