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Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061
Hi all. Not sure whether to put this in "Computer Science" or not..
Seems that many of my gf's expen$ive DVD movies no longer read. This is due to broken layer transitions as a result of very poor manufacturing. Particularly affected seem to be all her Star Trek Voyager disks and a lot of pre-1995 movies. Needless to say, Mr Magician here is expected to "fix" this somehow.
Ideas so far are:- 1) Modify a Lightscribe drive so that it can burn patterns to something other than a Lightscribe disk's top layer. I expect that this can be done by removing the sensor and refitting it above the drive with a salvaged-from-split-DVD LS read disk glued to the clamper disk. Reverse the motor wiring with a changeover relay so that the pattern spins the correct way round for the drive's firmware to recognise. Once done and tested, adjust the laser power by rewiring the red burning laser to turn on when the infrared does, and adding an attenuator inline so the drive runs both at their power limits without throwing a hissy fit.
The plan here is to locally heat just the layer transition glue and hopefully cause it to repolymerise. It only has to last long enough to copy the disks and then the content which I paid for should be accessible again.
I object to having to pay again when the disks have been looked after, have no scratches or scuffs yet refuse to read past 50% without skipping or in the worst case even causing my portable DVD to burn out its laser.
Option 2:- insert ideas here.
Or the manufacturers could be really nice and send me new disks in exchange for my old ones, which is about as likely as Iran signing up to the NPT and handing over all its weapons grade materials to the UN in time for Christmas.
Registered Member #53
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 04:31AM
Location: Ontario, Canada
Posts: 638
With the lightscribe are you planning on "burning" the whole disk uniformly or are you reading and burning only the pits of the data as the lightscribe encounters them? I didn't quite understand your method there.
Registered Member #1956
Joined: Wed Feb 04 2009, 01:22PM
Location: Jersey City
Posts: 172
Are you able to find this disks on download sites for bittorrent or something like this? If you already bought the content once I do not see why not to download a copy...
Registered Member #65
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:43AM
Location:
Posts: 1155
If the top foil is oxidized there is no way to inexpensively repair the medium.
However, there are optical polishing kits to repair scratches, and some DVD drives can read discs a DVDR/W drive will skip.
There are some countries where downloading/creating a movie backup of a title you physically own is 100% legal. Additionally, tools like Handbrake can fix somewhat damaged DVDs while transcoding them into a digital file.
...of course if your time is worth more than $3 an hour this option is less than ideal.
Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061
As it happens, I tried the first step (cutting down LS disk) Didn't work, it seems that the manufacturers use both layers of the LS and cutting the disk renders it unusable.
On the flip side it might be possible to make a duplicate pattern using a piece of PCB, derived from a LS disk fragment; see my earlier experiments.
The basic principle is sound, its just getting the drive to cooperate.
BTW I tried Handbrake, it "brakes" at around 49% and won't read any further. Tried Winhex 14.1 and it read some disks but most had errors. Cool "data slider" feature though, handy for testing drives etc. I even tried reading a disk in my old boat anchor 4x DVD-ROM and it didn't want to know
Alternate idea *3. Copy the signals from the spindle motor, laser power and positioner. Connect these to a donor drive so it slaves to the main one. Fake out the eject signal so the disk stays in the drive but the drive thinks the drawer is open or closed depending on what is needed.
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Hacking a Lightscribe drive for data recovery
