9 Mar
2006
9 Mar
'06
9:40 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
through at close to 100%. I've lost CD-Rs simply
by dropping them and
having them roll under a desk (dirt on the floor will do a number on a CD-R
(or CD) if the thing gets dragged across the floor.
I found an interesting tidbit a couple of weeks ago:
http://www.burningissues.net/how_to/scratchrepair/scratchrepair.htm
and
http://www.mcgee-flutes.com/scratches.html
Both recommend plain ol' Brasso as the best available CD repair. The
burningissues page even used some pretty good metrics for comparison.
(Chuck, I expect you know all the following; I'm just tossing it in
here 'cause I'm lazy)
I haven't done as much with damaged data CDs as with "odd" format
CDs, but I've found that Linux and NetBSD have *far* fewer issues with
burned media vs reader issues than Windows or MacOS. I regularly use
disks burned in Linux (on *cheap* media) in RRD42s on VAX, old 68K Macs
with 300i drives, etc.
I think a lot of the "CD reader" issues are really "CD writing
software" issues. A lot of CD-copy software will insist that all the
world's ISO9660 unlss you beat it up first. Even dd won't produce a
bootable image in some formats unless you tweak the blocksize. (AIX
v.<any> and IRIX v6.5 come to mind) Do some research on the format
you're copying and the software you're using, life gets much smoother.
On data CDs, setting dd to a stupidly small blocksize can help
recover files off a damaged or funky disk. I've gotten all the data off
a CD using "dd ... bs=1" that I couldn't get trying to read the files
directly. It took a while. ;)
Doc