CD-R Repair

[mikeyboy714]

What kind of repair kits have you all used to fix cd-r's, and which work the best? I have a bunch of old cd-r's that were sitting in a binder for a long time, and now I'm having trouble reading them. Some discs I can read certain files in certain drives, but inconsistently. Any ideas on how to fix this?

 

[boran]

I dont know a FIX but this method might help u to recover the data :

put the disc into a CDRW (they always have better chances at reading certain data)

use CloneCD and read to disc, try to do this at single speed (or the lowest speed yer writer supports) and use these settings for reading :

X : read subchannel data from data tracks
X : read subchannel data from audio tracks
X : abort on read error (this indicates a faulty file so we dont want this)
X : fast error skip (actually we dont want to skip the errors quickly but this will come in later)
O : intelligent bad sector scanner (this is a thing that tries to estimate where the bad sectors end, always gives bad copies for me)


then go into fast error skip settings and set it like this :

Read retries : 15 (we want to try as much as possible to recover the data)
Error correction : soft or hardware I always use software but use what u prefer...

this will give u a CD image which then in turn can be burnt into a new CD

hope this helped a bit

 

[dbwillis]

Ive been able to buff alot of scratches out of audio and CDR CD's with a buffing wheel on a bench grinder.
Just go real quick and light and dont heat up the CD

 

[bruincal]

sometimes on cheap cd-r's, the reading problem doesn't have anything to do with the bottom being scratched. sometimes its just that the recording dye on the cdr has broken down (along with your data). i've noticed that different dvd/cd drives sometimes read bad cdr's better than other drives.

 

[alpineranger]

Many cheap cdrs have an uprotected data layer on the top which is really prone to damage eg, writing on the surface with a felt tip marker will ruin it because the felt scratches the layer too much (of course you can't write anything on the bottom (reading) surface of the disk either!). Unfortunately, there really is no fix when the data recording layer is damaged.