Recover data from old scratched CD or DVD

This a  technique to recover data from damaged or scratched disks. Here we follow a special method of how to create a full working CD or DVD from the scratched one.

First some tools will be needed:

1. Alcohol 120% or similar disk burning software

2. Dry soft Facial tissue paper (or something like that).

3. Small piece of cotton

4. Light cooking oil (yes!)

Step 1 : Preparing the CD

Get the cotton and drop some water, start cleaning vertically the surface of CD. Do it atleast three 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 as if you are washing the CD with the oil. Dry carefully now. Some particles of oil will stay on the microsurface of the scratches. It is what we want!  It seems the oil helps the laser beam of the CD/DVD driver to get reflected properly to read the surface again. Sure this will work with small unreadable scratches – some hard scratches loose parts of the surface of the CD where we have data and it’s lost forever.
But if it is loosed try to fix it in place by using so called “CD-protective cover” over the opposite side of the writing surface (label side). Using this tip 80% of the small scratched CD’s should get recovered.

Step 2: – creating the new Disk

Just create one folder with the same name of the CD/DVD label for future burn reference, and copy the CD/DVD content(s) to the folder.

Normally; when the disk copy process finds the scratch/scratches, in majority of the cases, it is slowed down the reading and will recover ALL  damaged data. If not, it just tell you there’s an unreadable sector. In this case your disk is lost.

But from your “treated” CD or DVD finally windows explorer got all the data from the scratch and made a copy in the folder.

Now, write the disk with disk burning software (like Alcohol 120%, Nero): it will work.

Note: For damaged ISO CD or DVDs; you have to use some software like Ultra ISO  in addition.