CD data recovery?

[John Macdonald]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 04:22:44PM -0400, James Knott wrote:
> Henry Spencer wrote:
> >A low-tech :-) friend of mine asked me to inquire about this...
> >
> >He's got a couple of CDs that are physically broken.  (Shouldn't have put
> >them in checked baggage...)  They're not mass-market items, and it would
> >be difficult to replace them without repeating some fairly expensive
> >travels.  Anybody know of an outfit hereabouts that could recover their
> >contents, either as data files or as duplicate disks?
> >
> >(These are music CDs, as it happens, but I've come close to needing this
> >once or twice for damaged CDROMs, and now he's got me curious too.)
> 
> I've never heard of such as service, and you can be sure it would be 
> very expensive, if even possible.  Anyone attempting such a recovery 
> would have to rejoin the pieces, to extremely close tolerances.  Even 
> then they'd still have problems recovering the data.

and the drive they used would have to be 1x or slower -
there's no way that a rejoined disk could handle the stress
of the current rotational speeds.  (I recall hearing that
they were approaching the limit of the structural strength of
the glass disks, and would not be increasing much beyond the
current speeds.)

I suspect that to do the job properly would require a high
resolution scanner and special software to massage the image
to reconnect and clean up the area around the break/join.

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