Experience fixing a scratched CD?

[danzibr]

I've been going through my old games and had the desire to fix a few of the scratched ones I held onto. I googled how to fix CD's and I'm getting very mixed messages. Some people say use toothpaste, some say the toothpaste is rubbish. Some say use peanut butter, some say peanut butter is rubbish. Some say use Brasso, I used Brasso and it only scratched my disc more.

Can anyone provide (un)successful CD-repair stories?

[Grinner]

Ah. The murky world of disc repair.

I have only one. It was a copy of Summoner for the PS2, purchased secondhand from a GameStop. When I opened the case some days after its purchase, I noticed a small crack on the disc's surface, as though someone had jabbed it with something sharp. By the time I had gotten around to playing it, it was already too late to return it. Nonetheless, I placed it in my PS2, but it froze at the main menu.

Looking online, I too found the same contradictions abundant. I ended up trying the toothpaste option with no success. I imagine the success some people have had was dependent on the nature of the damage itself. The best results I've heard of involve the use of these disc polishers. I think you can buy them online for $20 or $30.

Edit: It just now occurred to me that DVDs might be more difficult to repair than CDs. They're both about the same size, but DVD's hold a much greater density of data. Therefore, it stands to reason that a DVD drive might be more sensitive to alterations of the disc's surface.

[Mando Knight]

Look to see if there's a a video rental place nearby (yes, those still exist, particularly in places where not everyone has the bandwidth to stream HD movies). They should have a disc polish/repair machine and might offer such a service.

[aspi]

Some people say use toothpaste, some say the toothpaste is rubbish. Some say use peanut butter, some say peanut butter is rubbish. Some say use Brasso, I used Brasso and it only scratched my disc more.
Anything that contains small particles that act as an abrasive agent is obviously a very bad choice (i.e. Brasso and most types of toothpaste), because you're essentially grinding very fine sand on the surface of your disk. While this is the idea behind polishing something, you'd actually have to remove as much of the surface layer, as the scratches are deep - and there is just no way you're going to be able to do this properly and equally over the entire surface by hand.

[Winter_Wolf]

I have both a hand-crank and electric CD/DVD repair kit. It's got some kind of mildly gritty solution that you put on the cleaning heads and then a liquid that you spritz on which helps get rid of the other stuff. Let me be perfectly honest, you're not going to get a disc that looks like new afterward, you're going to have a lot of microscratches on it BUT the way the scratches are aligned and the abrasion that smooths out the deep scratches that you had in the first place allows a higher chance of being able to read the disc when it's in the machine. It absolutely does not guarantee your disc will work. But sometimes it does, and that's worth trying. Some discs just cannot be saved, and there are a number of reasons for that. The electric one is better but you often need to run it two or three times. The hand crank pops open too frequently, and if you force it to stay closed you end up with a bloody circular groove at a certain spot on any disc you attempt to clean that way.

In any case, the abrasion factor means that even if fixing a CD/DVD works, it's got a finite limit of uses before you've destroyed the protective layer and you're scratching away the data layer. If you really love that disc, you need to locate/create another copy of it and keep it safe. ...My kid got her hands on my very expensive software data disc and gave it a couple of nice, deep scratches before I could make my backup of it. And NO ONE in the house thought to take it away from her before that happened.:smallfurious: Get/make a backup before you to anything else.

[Cespenar]

My memory is very fuzzy about this, but I think there were some programs that could somehow "force" the drive to read the disc whereas normally it wouldn't be able to.

Edit: I think... it was named Unstoppable Copier or something similar.

[Gnoman]

Look to see if there's a a video rental place nearby (yes, those still exist, particularly in places where not everyone has the bandwidth to stream HD movies). They should have a disc polish/repair machine and might offer such a service.

Any retro-game or used movie store should also have the capability. Trying to fix it yourself is something you should only do if there is no such service anywhere in your city - NO home methods work very well.

[Eldan]

Don't clean them with anything, especially not toothpaste. Instead, put them in the freezer overnight. Believe me, it works, I've done it to tons of old CDs.

[Tev]

Don't clean them with anything, especially not toothpaste. Instead, put them in the freezer overnight. Believe me, it works, I've done it to tons of old CDs.

That sounds interesting, I might try that.

Why would it work though? :smallconfused:

[Brother Oni]

That sounds interesting, I might try that.

Why would it work though? :smallconfused:

Only reference with technical details I can find for this is this link (http://www.tomsguide.com/us/freeze-audio-discs,review-1408.html).

Apparently freezing the disc and letting it thaw slowly (and dry!) "relaxes the lattice structure of the polycarbonate substrate distorted by heat and pressure during the pressing process".

[Grinner]

Don't clean them with anything, especially not toothpaste. Instead, put them in the freezer overnight. Believe me, it works, I've done it to tons of old CDs.

Trying it now.

[Eldan]

I have no idea how it works. My cousin told me this one when I was, oh, eight or so, and I've been doing it since then, mostly with old PC games from the nineties.

Edit: and obviously, put it in there with the reading surface pointing up and nothing on top of it.

[Zeofar]

I recommend trying Homestuck.

[Grinner]

Edit: and obviously, put it in there with the reading surface pointing up and nothing on top of it.

Oh...I just put the whole case in.

Anyway, it's been ~9 hours. Time to see if it helped.

Edit: Actually, I'm gonna let thaw for a bit.

Edit 2: No luck. The disc was the Summoner one mentioned earlier. Between the preexisting damage and my previous attempts to fix it, it may not be salvageable.

I'm gonna try again just in case.

[noparlpf]

Depends on how deep the scratch is. If it's just in the protective coating the data is technically still there, but the optical drive has trouble reading it because the scratch causes the laser to refract weirdly. If it's deeper and actually damages the bit with the ones and zeros in it then there's nothing you can do to fix it.

I think the principle behind most scratch removal kits for eyeglasses and stuff is to kind of wear down around the scratches or to dissolve a bit of the protective coating that has the scratch in it so that everything is down to the same level, so that's probably a bad idea for an optical disk.


On the topic of scratched CDs... I've had two or three CDs in my car's CD changer randomly crap out on me, all near the edges of the disks, and without taking them out of the CD changer or anything. Do you guys think that might be due to temperature changes or do you think there's a bit of grit stuck in my CD changer somewhere?

[Gnoman]

On the topic of scratched CDs... I've had two or three CDs in my car's CD changer randomly crap out on me, all near the edges of the disks, and without taking them out of the CD changer or anything. Do you guys think that might be due to temperature changes or do you think there's a bit of grit stuck in my CD changer somewhere?

What does the damage look like? If it's a straight-line across, or an arc that would make a complete circle if continued, then there is either a foreign object in the player contacting the disc or else a misaligned part of the player doing so.

If the damage is more of a chip, then it's probably shock - the player doesn't adequately dampen the motion of your car on less-than-even terrain (such as potholes, speed-bumps, etc), and the disc "jumped" and hit something.

If the disc is cracked - then it could be temperature related.

[Grinner]

If the disc is cracked - then it could be temperature related.

It's easiest to describe as a crack, but it's a weird one. Doesn't seem to be temperature-related, since I bought it like that. You can actually see it reflected in the data layer.

Anyway, I'll try it again tomorrow.

[Gnoman]

It's easiest to describe as a crack, but it's a weird one. Doesn't seem to be temperature-related, since I bought it like that. You can actually see it reflected in the data layer.

Anyway, I'll try it again tomorrow.

If there's ANY damage to the data layer, the disc is dead.

[aspi]

If there's ANY damage to the data layer, the disc is dead.
CDs can actually tolerate some damage to the data layer and still function normally thanks to the error correction scheme that is used to store the data. There's a famous example of drilling a hole through an audio CD, which won't affect the playback as long as the hole is small enough (i.e. 1mm).

[Winter_Wolf]

When I lived in China, nearly every disc of any kind was made from the cheapest, third rate materials and would eventually just *rot* in the data layer. Even the ones that were legitimately bought. Or maybe especially those ones; I had a copy of "Wheat" which was pretty good that we got from a State sponsored store which managed to play all of twice before developing fatal faults in the data layer.

One might suspect that it was an intentional thing to keep people buying and rebuying the same thing over and over, but since everyone would just move to street copies if that were the case (because ironically they are more durable), it was probably just the fact that none of those discs could pass a US/European/Japan/Aus quality control check so the manufacturer offloaded them dirt cheap just to be rid of them.

[noparlpf]

What does the damage look like? If it's a straight-line across, or an arc that would make a complete circle if continued, then there is either a foreign object in the player contacting the disc or else a misaligned part of the player doing so.

If the damage is more of a chip, then it's probably shock - the player doesn't adequately dampen the motion of your car on less-than-even terrain (such as potholes, speed-bumps, etc), and the disc "jumped" and hit something.

If the disc is cracked - then it could be temperature related.

Looks like a couple of non-contiguous jittery little scratches near the outer edge where it would tend to flex more. Maybe there's a little piece of grit in the sixth disk tray and when the car bounces too hard it just gets a little bit of a scratch there. Would running one of those brush CDs through help or do those only brush the lens?