Hello, Reciently I bought a new hard drive and was I the process of installing all my old games on it. When I found that one of my dvd's has become scratched and wont install. I took it to blockbuster and had them try to fix it. and while it looks fine, except for some very small very fine scratches it still wont install. So, if I wanted to send it back to the publisher to replace the dvd, it would cost 15 + shipping, or I could buy one on e-bay for 20 with shipping, or i could buy one from a store for, i think 30 bucks. These are the options as far as I see it, but before I buy another disk, I was wondering if there are any tricks that you guys may know of that I can do to try to fix the dvd? Thanks for any suggestions.
I thought I had heard that one before but I wasn't sure. nothing I can really lose by trying it at this point. anyone else have any suggestions?
i've used toothpaste many times on cds and dvds. use a little bit of toothpaste and a wet rag, and go out from the middle in straight lines. no circular scrubbing.
didn't work, but I used a gel tooth paste. apparently you are supposed to use a non-gel paste. I alsu read that scratches that are circular cant usually be fixed. which is what these are. I'm trying to rip the dvd right now. if that works (which I dont think it will but its worth a try) i'll just burn a copy of it.
"Brasso"(metal polisher) works good from what I've heard from friends, but be sure its used in a well ventilated area.
brasso will work, but it's kind of corrosive and could ruin the cd by eating away too much of the plastic. and yeah, gel won't work very well. you need some cheap, crappy paste.
I've used brasso a couple of times - it wasn't me that scratched them!!! Anyway, brasso is like using the next finer grit sandpaper when polishing: it leaves heaps of smaller scratches, but the larger ones are smoothed out if not removed, and if the data side of the disc isn't damaged, you will have a good chance of being able to burn it, or copy the data or whatever I haven't used toothpaste, but i imagine it's a little bit finer again, so after using brasso, if still no go, then try using toothpaste for the next stage of polishing. If still no go, then definitely try using a banana. You have nothing to loose at this point, so at least you can say "i even tried using a banana!" I imagine the soft inside of the banana skin is what we are supposed to use? There is of course the option of going down to the video store, and asking them to put your disk in their dvd polisher - those things work beautifully when they have been cleaned recently that is!
I've heard of the toothpaste method but it didnt work for me, that being said it was a really scratched disk and I used circular patterns. If the scratching is light, perhaps you could buy a disk cleaner? They cost about 7 quid but you get a fair few uses out of them, i've repaired my sisters bf's oblivion disk for his 360 using one and my gt4 disk so they do work!
using program called isopuzzle right now. it turns the dvd into an iso image, and goes over the bad sectors again and again. when i first ran it i had 40MB of bad sectors. now its down to 27MB. Slow going but so far its working. been trying different things as I go. just tried turtle wax. I have also tried, shoe polish and RainX. I dont know if any of them made a difference. Rainx made the water run off it nicely though. edit 22.5MB left, I dont think that I will be able to recover it all. I found a bottle of turtle wax polisher. supposed to removed scratches in clear coats on cars. makes it shine really nice. Not sure if its removing the scratches or not though.
I have put so much "stuff" on this dvd, that there are no more scratches to be seen on it. yet, it still doesn't work. the program that I am using to try and rip the files off is stuck at 99.5%. Which accounts for 16MB. sigh, anyone got a copy of supreme commander I can have?
yeah I figured as much. looks like there is about 7.5mb of info that I just cant rip off the dvd no matter how long i let the program run. I may try to have it buffed again. but pretty soon it would of just been cheaper to buy a new dvd. oh well.
Let this be a queue to everyone else to burn a replica of your discs and store the original in a safe place.
