Recovering as much as possible from a bad media

[cb89]

Hi,

 

I'm having the errors below with a very old CD (10+ years). It has probably gone bad, we had multiple copies of it and all are behaving exactly the same.

 

W 18:19:03 Retry Failed - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error

W 18:19:03 Failed to Read Sector 58449 - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error

 

There are really minor scratches on the CD itself and all copies are behaving the same. Please note that all copies were at different people.

 

Anyway, what I'm trying to do here is to try to read all readable sectors as fast as possible (as I don't think that retrying is helping) and fill in unreadable with zeros or simply skip/ignore them.

 

I was able to create an ISO with such a method but it took like 30 hours to get from %15 to %20... Which then I aborted and kept the ISO file. This CD basically contains 2 MPG (video) files inside so the recovered MPG files still play with some some artifacts (which is much better than not playing at all)...

 

So what I'm trying to do here is to complete this ISO creation as fast as possible with minimum retries etc (because I have a long way to go). What do you suggest? How can I increase the speed of this operation? I've already set software retries to 0 (it was 20 before).

 

Thanks!

Edited January 28, 2017 by cb89

[LIGHTNING UK!]

Isopuzzle might be useful for this, especially if you have access to multiple discs with the same problem. You could try to read bits from each one and hopefully end up with a complete image.