It seems Toothpaste is a decent disk cleaning abrasive for removing minor scratches that may be preventing dvd/cd rom drives from reading it correctly.
I had two DVD disks about 4 years old that were scratched enough that I could only copy half of the 4.7GB off for both of them. About to throw them both out in frustration, I had the sudden idea of cleaning the disks with toothpaste as I have heard before, but had never tried it myself. Using a small cotton bud and a small dab of toothpaste (normal, no extra strength or special versions) I cleaned the disk in a inside to outside motion. After cleaning and the removal of the toothpaste (using just a small cotton bud with water), I dried it, stuck it in my machine and it read. No errors :-)
I definitely won’t be using this disk again but i was able to extract the data and put it onto a new disk. All fixed.
2 Responses
Arae you supposed to go in a circular motion or in an d out from the center? THat is what i heard.
A lot of people say move from the inside of the disk to the outside however I haven’t had any issues with ‘data loss’ from not doing that. The disks I was trying to recover wern’t mission critical, so i just went in a small, circular motion between the outside and middle – not a circular motion around the entire middle disk.
If the disk your trying to clean is very important try work out from the center of the disk like “spokes on a wheel” which complies with what other people say – personally I don’t believe it makes a difference.