Hacking Tips and Tricks

   
How to recover MOST of scratched CD data discs
I,today, learn an old technique to how to recover a damaged or scratched cd disks with very minute loss of data. In this case i have a game  with a chunck of 4 mb lost with a scratch in CD1 Install. Here we cover some special techniques of how to create a full working CD from the scratched one.
First some tools will be needed:

1. Alcohol 120%
2. UltraISO
3. Windows XP/2000 (not tested on 95/98/me)
3. Small piece of cotton
4. Dry cleaner paper
5. Finally, oil for cooking.
First step – preparing the CD

    Get the cotton and drop some water, start cleaning vertically the surface of CD.

    Do it 3 times and dry the water with a piece of dry cleaner paper. With a new piece of cotton, drop some oil for cooking and start to wet the surface like you are washing the CD with the oil. Dry carefully now. Some particles of oil will stay on the microsurface of the scrath. It’s okay.
    Seems the oil helps the laser of the CD/DVD driver to read the surface again. Sure this will work with small unreadable scratchs – some hard scratchs loose parts of the surface of the CD where we have data and it’s lost forever.
    But if it is loosed try anyway. Whith this tip 80% of the small scratched CD’s coud be recovered.

Second Step – testing the CD

    With Alcohol 120% make an ISO – image making wizard – and lets see if the app can read the loosed surface. In my case Alcohol 120% had recovered 60% of the data.

    This is not enough. Have tryed other appz, they do not recover all the data. But the CD/DVD driver laser CAN recover all data in this case. the data is still there, what we do?

Third step – making the new CD

    With the main copy system of windows explorer you can do it. Just create one folder with the same name of the CD label for future burn reference, and copy the CD content to the folder.
    When the CD copy process find the scratch, in majority of the cases, it’s slow down the reading and will recover ALL loosed data.If not, it just tell you there’s an unreadable sector.
    In this case your CD is lost. But it’s not my case, finally windows explorer got all the data from the scratch and made a copy in the folder with the ultraISO, wrote the original CD label, drop the content of the folder and save as Iso. You can Test the new CD just mounting the iso in the Alcohol 120%.
    In my case i did ISO of the two discs from MAX PAYNE 2 and tested installing from the mounted ISO. Works like a charm. I got the 4 mb lost again. So, I have burned the CD and now i have a working copy from the scratched one.
    Enjoy.