Scanning of the damaged CDs?

#1

Hello again. As you all could have guessed I am trying to save the data from all those CDs I got around here. And tbh today I have run into a first non readable CD. Both ImgBurn as well as Isobuster were giving me a hard time complaining about errors. (I have also tried to read(to iso file) some of the CDs with CDburnerXP but I gave up since it doesn’t seem to read some of them good.:frowning: )
Well since none of the above tools would read the CD I came up with the idea to try to “dd” it under Virtual Box in Arch Linux. I did a search on dd online looking for a man page :slight_smile: and voila the ddrescue came up on google search. (Now please don’t tell me that man pages are already installed on Arch? :slight_smile: It was just a quick Arch install and on 27" screen man pages appear with little too small letters for long time readings. Besides I just wanted to have an option to print man pages out in case I needed that). After quick install of ddrescue in Arch I gave Arch access to the Dvd drive TSSTCorp SH-224DB and fired up ddrescue with the following command

ddrescue /dev/sr0 /mnt/Cd1.iso

It complained about some errors on /dev/sr0 but it did read the CD successfully. Now I wanted to check that the game would install from that image and yes it does. Mounted the CD iso in deamon tools and let VirtualBox once again have acess to it. And then I installed the game under WindowsXP also in VirtualBox and the game runs perfectly fine.(it is and older game called Blade and Sword). Avira antivirus was giving me problems when trying to run the game in Win7.(something called Dxtest, not sure yet what was all that about).

So if anyone has any explanations why on earth wouldn’t ImgBurn or Isobuster read that CD properly and ddrescue did please let me know? :). I hope this might help someone who has the same problems with CD/DVD readings.

I might also add that some of the Memorex CDs have wierd miscolouring “patterns” on them. The CDs were not exposed to the direct sun light. They have been stored in CD spins in the dark closet.
Regards Nick

#2

It really depends on what the errors exactly were.

#3

[QUOTE=Albert;2788395]It really depends on what the errors exactly were.[/QUOTE]

Thanks for the reply Albert.
Not sure if the log from ImgBurn gives any clues.

I 23:15:32 Destination Free Space: 3 877 769 314 304 Bytes (3 786 884 096,00 KiB) (3 698 129,00 MiB) (3 611,45 GiB)
I 23:15:32 Destination File System: NTFS
I 23:15:32 File Splitting: Auto
I 23:15:34 Read Speed - Effective: 40x
I 23:15:34 Reading Session 1 of 1... (1 Track, LBA: 0 - 335410)
I 23:15:34 Reading Track 1 of 1... (MODE1/2048, LBA: 0 - 335410)
W 23:15:47 Failed to Read Sectors 800 - 831 - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error
W 23:15:52 Failed to Read Sector 829 - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error
W 23:15:52 Retrying (1 of 20)...
I 23:15:57 Reading Sectors...
W 23:16:04 Failed to Read Sector 830 - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error
W 23:16:04 Retrying (1 of 20)...
W 23:16:13 Retry Failed - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error
W 23:16:13 Retrying (2 of 20)...
W 23:16:22 Retry Failed - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error
W 23:16:22 Retrying (3 of 20)...
W 23:16:31 Retry Failed - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error
W 23:16:31 Retrying (4 of 20)...

And IsoBuster was complaining about that “Sector 830 couldn’t be read Error:03/11/05” is that the date of the file?

#4

Those L-EC errors are generally referring to physical flaws in the disc.

I don’t know anything about ddrescue, I’m not a Linux person, but do you know if it replaces damaged sectors with blank data? If so, there may be parts of that game that will not work, and you may be hard pressed to predict where those occur.

DXtest was probably something in the game that looks for which version of DirectX is installed.

#5

Ok thanks for the answers. Is there a way to determine what file is in that unreadable sector? I was looking through the ddrescue command trying to find out what it did but I can’t find any info about how it really works.

#6

Does your system recognize the CD and the fact you have data on it? Have you tried simply taking the data from the disc on to a HDD, etc, making sure you have enough space? I would not try doing it as a whole, but maybe a file or folder at a time. If it all transfers over you should be fine and the info should be able to move to another disc. If not it should give you an idea where the problems are, which files or folders are involved and that is why you have to do it some at a time.

#7

Since the discs are of old games, the read errors (resulting from unreadable sectors) almost certainly were deliberate as they are part of the copy protection; likely safedisc as the read errors noted in your previous post started at sector 800 which is typical of safedisc v.1.

If you want to make an image of the cds, use alcohol, CloneCD or Blindwrite (with the program set to ignore read errors). When you make the image, reading of the first 2,000 or so sectors will be slow but it will then speed up because all the deliberately unreadable sectors are in the first 2,000 or so.

#8

Some days ago I tried quality-scans on protected CDs and was a bit surprised. Safedisc V1 and V2 (I think max. 2.8) can be scanned without problems, the artificial read errors were ignored by the Benq 1640. ProtectCD(VOB)-CDs can´t be scanned, the kind of errors wasn´t liked by the Benq.

#9

http://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/

#10

This is an SCSi response/sense code.

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