Windows Help Center

How to recover MOST of scratched CD data discs

I learn an old thecnique to how to recover damaged or scratched disks

with some lost of data. In this case i have one borrowed game - MAX PAYNE 2

with a chunck of 4 mb lost with a scratch in CD1 Install. Here we cover some

special thecniques of how to create a full working CD from the scratched one.

First some tools will be needed:

1. Alcohol 120%

2. UltraISO

3. Windows XP/2000 (not tested on 95/98/me)

3. Small piece of cotton

4. Dry cleaner paper

5. Finally, oil for cooking.

First step - preparing the CD

Get the cotton and drop some water, start cleaning vertically the surface of CD.

Do it 3 times and dry the water with a piece of dry cleaner paper. With a new piece

of cotton, drop some oil for cooking and start to wet the surface like you are

washing the CD with the oil. Dry carefully now. Some particles of oil will stay on the

microsurface of the scrath. It's okay. Seems the oil helps the laser of the CD/DVD driver

to read the surface again. Sure this will work with small unreadable scratchs - some hard

scratchs loose parts of the surface of the CD where we have data and it's lost forever.

But if it is loosed try anyway. Whith this tip 80% of the small scratched CD's coud be

recovered.

Second Step - testing the CD

With Alcohol 120% make an ISO - image making wizard - and lets see if the app can

read the loosed surface. In my case Alcohol 120% had recovered 60% of the data.

This is not enough. Have tryed other appz, they do not recover all the data. But the

CD/DVD driver laser CAN recover all data in this case. the data is still there, what we do?

third step - making the new CD

With the main copy system of windows explorer you can do it. Just create one folder

with the same name of the CD label for future burn reference, and copy the CD content

to the folder. When the CD copy process find the scratch, in majority of the cases, it's

slow down the reading and will recover ALL loosed data.If not, it just tell you there's

an unreadable sector. In this case your CD is lost. But it's not my case, finally

windows explorer got all the data from the scratch and made a copy in the folder.

with the ultraISO, wrote the original CD label, drop the content of the folder and

save as Iso. You can Test the new CD just mounting the iso in the Alcohol 120%. In my

case i did ISO of the two discs from MAX PAYNE 2 and tested installing from the mounted

ISO. Works like a charm. I got the 4 mb lost again. So, I have burned the CD and now i

have a working copy from the scratched one.

Sounds too bizzarre, but works. Course you can jump the cleaning process and try to copy

the content with Windows explorer. But in my case did not work without oil...

 How to modify *.exe files

learn how to change *.exe files, in 5 easy steps:

1) Don't try to modify a prog by editing his source in a dissasembler.Why?

Cause that's for programmers and assembly experts only.

try to view it in hex you'll only get tons of crap you don't understand.

First off, you need Resource Hacker(last version). It's a resource editor-

very easy to use, You can download it at h**p://www.users.on.net/johnson/resourcehacker/

2) Unzip the archive, and run ResHacker.exe. You can check out the help file too

3) You will see that the interface is simple and clean. Go to the menu FileOpen or press Ctrl+O to open a file. Browse your way to the file you would like to edit. You can edit *.exe, *.dll, *.ocx, *.scr and *.cpl files, but this tutorial is to teach you how to edit *.exe files, so open one.

4) In the left side of the screen a list of sections will appear.

The most common sections are

-String table;

-RCData;

-Dialog;

-Cursor group;

-Bitmap;

-WAV.

*Icon: You can wiew and change the icon(s) of the program by double-clicking the icon section,chossing the icon, right-clicking on it an pressing "replace resource". After that you can choose the icon you want to replace the original with.

*String table: a bunch of crap, useful sometimes, basic programming knowladge needed.

*RCData: Here the real hacking begins. Modify window titles, buttons, text, and lots more!

*Dialog:Here you can modify the messages or dialogs that appear in a program. Don't forget to press "Compile" when you're done!

*Cursor group: Change the mouse cursors used in the program just like you would change the icon.

*Bitmap: View or change images in the programs easy!

*WAV:Change the sounds in the prog. with your own.

5) In the RCData,Dialog,Menu and String table sections you can do a lot of changes. You can modify or translate the text change links, change buttons, etc.

TIP: To change a window title, search for something like: CAPTION "edit this".

TIP: After all operations press the "Compile Script" button, and when you're done editing save, your work @ FileSave(Save as).

TIP: When you save a file,the original file will be backed up by default and renamed to Name_original and the saved file will have the normal name of the changed prog.

TIP: Sometimes you may get a message like: "This program has a non-standard resource layout... it has probably been compressed with an .EXE compressor." That means that Resource Hacker can't modify it because of it's structure.

 Services You Can Disable

There are quite a few services you can disable from starting automatically.

This would be to speed up your boot time and free resources.

They are only suggestions so I suggestion you read the description of each one when you run Services

and that you turn them off one at a time.

Some possibilities are:

Alerter

Application Management

Clipbook

Fast UserSwitching

Human Interface Devices

Indexing Service

Messenger

Net Logon

NetMeeting

QOS RSVP

Remote Desktop Help Session Manager

Remote Registry

Routing & Remote Access

SSDP Discovery Service

Universal Plug and Play Device Host

Web Client

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Cleaning the Prefetch Directory

WindowsXP has a new feature called Prefetch. This keeps a shortcut to recently used programs.

However it can fill up with old and obsolete programs.

To clean this periodically go to:

Star / Run / Prefetch

Press Ctrl-A to highlight all the shorcuts

Delete them

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Not Displaying Logon, Logoff, Startup and Shutdown Status Messages

To turn these off:

Start Regedit

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionpoliciessystem

If it is not already there, create a DWORD value named DisableStatusMessages

Give it a value of 1

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Clearing the Page File on Shutdown

Click on the Start button

Go to the Control Panel

Administrative Tools

Local Security Policy

Local Policies

Click on Security Options

Right hand menu - right click on "Shutdown: Clear Virtual Memory Pagefile"

Select "Enable"

Reboot

For regedit users.....

If you want to clear the page file on each shutdown:

Start Regedit

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory ManagementClearPageFileAtShutdown

Set the value to 1

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No GUI Boot

If you don't need to see the XP boot logo,

Run MSCONFIG

Click on the BOOT.INI tab

Check the box for /NOGUIBOOT

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Speeding the Startup of Some CD Burner Programs

If you use program other than the native WindowsXP CD Burner software,

you might be able to increase the speed that it loads.

Go to Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Services

Double-click on IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service

For the Startup Type, select Disabled

Click on the OK button and then close the Services window

If you dont You should notice

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Getting Rid of Unread Email Messages

To remove the Unread Email message by user's login names:

Start Regedit

For a single user: Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionUnreadMail

For all users: Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionUnreadMail

Create a DWORD key called MessageExpiryDays

Give it a value of 0

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Decreasing Boot Time

Microsoft has made available a program to analyze and decrease the time it takes to boot to WindowsXP

The program is called BootVis

Uncompress the file.

Run BOOTVIS.EXE

For a starting point, run Trace / Next Boot + Driver Delays

This will reboot your computer and provide a benchmark

After the reboot, BootVis will take a minute or two to show graphs of your system startup.

Note how much time it takes for your system to load (click on the red vertical line)

Then run Trace / Optimize System

Re-Run the Next Boot + Drive Delays

Note how much the time has decreased

Mine went from approximately 33 to 25 seconds.

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Increasing Graphics Performance

By default, WindowsXP turns on a lot of shadows, fades, slides etc to menu items.

Most simply slow down their display.

To turn these off selectively:

Right click on the My Computer icon

Select Properties

Click on the Advanced tab

Under Performance, click on the Settings button

To turn them all of, select Adjust for best performance

My preference is to leave them all off except for Show shadows under mouse pointer and Show window contents while dragging

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Increasing System Performance

If you have 512 megs or more of memory, you can increase system performance

by having the core system kept in memory.

Start Regedit

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory ManagementDisablePagingExecutive

Set the value to be 1

Reboot the computer

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Increasing File System Caching

To increase the amount of memory Windows will locked for I/O operations:

Start Regedit

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory Management

Edit the key IoPageLockLimit

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Resolving Inability to Add or Remove Programs

If a particular user cannot add or remove programs, there might be a simple registry edit neeed.

Go to HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesUninstall

Change the DWORD NoAddRemovePrograms to 0 disable it

4096 - 32megs of memory or less

8192 - 32+ megs of memory

16384 - 64+ megs of memory

32768 - 128+ megs of memory

65536 - 256+ megs of memory