How does one go about repairing hard to read, damaged or scratched disks? Well, you can buff out the scratch with toothpaste by eradicating the circular scratch. Thus, making a new set of scratches from the inside to the outside of the disk in a straight line, which the lens can read through. You can clean it with mild soap and water or Windex. You can use Plextools (which has worked wonders for me) and just hope that your drive will read the disk to an image at least once and burn a new disk of the image. Or, you can find unique plastic polishes or enhancers to hopefully help the lens read through the marred or damaged plastic. Though there are a few products out there known as enhancers, which supposedly make audio & video better, they are often expensive - very expensive and used mostly by audiophiles. I haven't known these products to help recover a damaged disk. Here is one example of an "enhancer" that is called Optrix.
However, I have stumbled on a much cooler product called Plexus, that literally fills in all the scratches on any plastic item with a specially formulated polymer. Talk about recovering the data or audio off of scratched or damaged disks? This is the stuff to use! Motorcycle fanatics have been using it exclusively on their helmets for years.
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Clear plastics can be damaged by cleaners intended for glass........Plexus seals the pores in plastic surfaces with a micro-thin layer of shiny, protective (polymer) wax.. This plastic polish is used by NASA and the Air Force. In fact, it's mandated for use on the B1B Stealth Bomber to clean, polish and protect the canopy. That's a 3 million dollar canopy!- autogeek.net |
It seems that I could only find the product on motorcycle & automotive websites. Nevertheless, it is cheaper, easier to use & way more effective for our purposes than the more expensive and futile Optrix. I can go further to say, that I personally hear and see improvement in the audio/video of my DVD's & CD's. But I've gotten a lot of slack for making that statement before. I think it makes the bit-error rate (BER) lower, therefore producing better sound & picture.
What I have found is, a really damaged CD, provided it still has all its data below that nasty damaged plastic, can be repaired then re-burned successfully using Plexus and Plextools together. EAC is a very powerful error recovery program as well, that is only enhanced by utilizing Plexus. I have no stock in the company, but have just come out of the woodwork with this one, as I have experimented with over 3 cans of it so far. I've even revived old CD-ROM lenses, when putting together used Pentium PC's for people that need internet ready machines on an extreme budget. It's also proven very effective for scratched CDR's, game disks, DVD's and even PC cases with the clear windows on the side!
Plextor has begun to use black colored trays & Yamaha makes a burner with wider gaps in the CDR, so the lens doesn't have to work as hard focusing on the data. I sense that using Plexus has given me very similar type of results, utilizing the same basic principle, though achieving it in a different way. I have recovered lost CDR's of data using this product, especially in conjunction with EAC.
Plexus is inexpensive and as easy to use as Windex. It is the only product I have found to remove the visible haze from the playing side of a disk, making the plastic clear once again and a little goes a very long way. I dare anyone to agree with me that it improves the sound of an audio CD bought in the store the very same day you purchased it. Too bad it doesn't remove copy protection - just kidding.
Source: plexusplasticcleaner.com
