Well, I thought, I’d share a little something I discovered today while trying to recover a movie from a badly scratched CD.

When the disc you’re trying to recover from is a CD (not a DVD), you’ll recover more if you use a CD-ROM drive instead of a DVD drive.

When recovering from a disc, I discovered that my laptop has it’s own retry count which made the recovery process extremely slow when combined with a recovery program. So, I took out an external DVD drive to try and recover.

In the end, I managed to get about 47% of real data which isn’t very good. I could play the CD on my DVD player and it could play at least 90% of the disc perfectly without glitching.

It, then, occurred to me that DVD drives may be more sensitive and error prone. So, I disassembled the external drive and hacked in a CD-ROM drive. So far, it has recovered at least 70% legit data - a huge improvement over using a DVD drive.

So next time, use a CD-ROM drive instead of a DVD drive for recovering if the disc is a CD.