Read mode - how do I skip empty sectors on poorly burned disks?

[1Johnny1]

Hi -

 

I need advice on something I'm trying to do.

 

I work in television, and I get hundreds of DVDs a year from production houses to work on, but occasionally I'll get disks burned so poorly that they won't play in my DVD drive. Thankfully, ImgBurn can usually "see" deeply enough into the bad disks to create an image file, which I can then play using a virtual drive like DaemonTools or PowerISO. All I have to do is reduce retries to 0 and tell ImgBurn to ignore read errors. This way it quickly screens all the bad (empty) early sectors, and voila! It gets to the good stuff and begins recording a playable image file, usually within minutes if only the first few hundred sectors are bad/empty.

 

But there are those stubborn few disks with bad sectors until Sector 100,000 or so (I can tell by using the amazing "sector viewer" feature). Even with retries set to 0 and "ignore read errors" checked, it can literally take days to get to the written sectors. No time for that, though.

 

Can I somehow tell ImgBurn to skip attempts at reading, say, the first 50,000 sectors? This would greatly reduce the length of time it takes for me to start working on these disks.

 

Finally, though I love the "sector viewer" feature, it takes me a long time to find the sectors with info written to them. Are there any programs out there that can help me do this faster?

 

Thanks!

 

Johnny

[blutach]

Try ISOBuster for more flexible sector viewing.

 

ImgBurn does a 1:1 copy in read mode. If the sectors are bad, it'll take its time. Some decrypting programs can write over bad sectors, but usually, you will end up with a bum disk.

 

Try cleaning and polishing the discs.

 

Regards