How to recover MOST of scratched CD data discs

How to recover MOST of scratched CD data discs

I learn an old technique to how to recover damaged or scratched disks
with some lost of data.
In this case i have one borrowed game - MAX PAYNE 2
with a chunk 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
micro surface of the scratch. 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 scratch - some hard
scratch loose parts of the surface of the CD where we have data and it's lost forever.
But if it is loosed try anyway. With this tip 80% of the small scratched CD's could 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 tried other apps, 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.

Sounds too bizarre, but works. Course you can jump the cleaning process and try to copy
the content with Windows explorer. But in my case did not work without oil...