An optical drive has error correction built into it and if it is missing a bit or a byte from a track/file it can usually fill it in and make it work or angle the laser a little and read around the scratch. The reason is that if you use a circular motion you could scratch a track down it’s length and make it unreadable. The important thing is to use a center to edge motion. I expected this to do nothing but make the disc really clean and nothing else, thinking, “This will make a good article for PCMech because it will totally prove without a shadow of a doubt that this never works.”īack when CD’s were new and there were no optical computer drives yet, I used to use cigarette ash and a cd cleaning kit with a very soft cloth to polish scratches and make my music playable again. I smeared the paste so it completely covered the data side of the disc, let it dry for a few minutes, then washed it off thoroughly and dried with paper towels. Six years is long enough to wait for anything. That didn’t happen to me, but it could have.Īs a last-ditch effort, I tried the toothpaste method because darn it, I want the f**king data off this disc, and if not it’s getting tossed. In fact one time I was able to get a CD read that was cracked – although I wouldn’t recommend that because it can break apart in the drive and spread itty bits all over the place, ruining the the inside of the optical bay completely. The disc was scratched slightly and I’ve definitely seen ones in much worse condition. I’ve had in my possession a CD I burned 6 years ago that would fail on every attempt to have an optical drive read it, but kept it anyway in the hopes someday I could find a way to get it readable again.
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