Repaired a scratched disc with Rain-X

[foobaz]

I had a scratched DVD that generated tons of seek errors and some EC errors in DVDD. I always clean a disc like this with 91% isopropyl alcohol before putting it in the drive but this wasn't enough. I read through several threads on scratch repair and the simplest, non-destructive removal method seems to be polishing the disc surface so as to fill in the scratches with a wax or non-abrasive polish such as car wax or furniture polish. The closest thing I had was a bottle of Rain-X. BTW this stuff works wonders on your car's windshield if you haven't tried it. It puts a clear hydrophobic polymer coating on the surface that fills micro surface scratches and causes water to bead up like on a freshly waxed car. I figured it would at least fill in the micro scratches and smooth out the surface of the disc but there was an area about 1X3mm with a series of gouges several tenths of a mm deep that may have needed more than this. I thought at least it might fill in the gouges enough to show an improvement. The stuff dries to a fairly viscous wax-like haze and then you just polish it with a tissue. It looks nice and shiny and smooth when done. Of course the scratches and gouges were still visible but they were covered over with a nice clear polymer coat. Much to my delight DVDD was able to rip the offending VTS with only a single EC error instead of dozens of seek and EC errors (before I quit the program). Not bad for a quick and dirty (actually clean ;)) fix. And there's tons left over for the car. ;) Walmart has it for a few bucks.

BTW I found a very good thread on polsihing out deep scratches with a series of fine abrasive emery paper:

Repairing scratched cd's (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=20&t=2633)

[Shinigami-Sama]

iso isn't good for your disks, it actualy dies them out and makes them more britle, but I'm horrible with disks and they're scratched all to hell and I never get a single error, strange, if one fails I'll remeber that one though

[foobaz]

iso isn't good for your disks, it actualy dies them out and makes them more britleDid you mean 'dries'? I don't think so. Polycarbonate is a very robust material. But who cares if it means recovering and backing up an unplayable disc? I always clean rental discs this way. They are typically filthy and I wouldn't risk my precious drive on them. In fact, Sony recommends regular rubbing alcohol for the purpose:
http://sony.storagesupport.com/mediacare.htm

[Buzz Lightyear]

@Shinigami-Sama:
Iso-Propyl-Alcohol is not harmful to your discs. I've been using it to clean all the CDs and DVDs I use for years and NEVER had any problems. It's really good to get all the grease and dirt off.
Besides that, many manufacturers of flat-screen panels recommend it to clean your screen. So if it's good for my 1000€ screen, it can't be bad for a 0,50€ CD, right? ;)

[CWR03]

I've had a few severe scratches to remove myself - most disks were repaired pretty easily with a DVD Dr., but a couple of deeper scratches were removed with Brasso. I haven't had one bad enough to need to sand it, but I've sanded and polished bad scratches in Lexan before - it's not hard to make it look new again.

[Shinigami-Sama]

hmm I've seen iso melt CDs before, literaly melt them, so i'm causious, and yes I ment 'dries' my laptop keys have a tendancy not to want to press, most notably my 'end' key,
but also that was 99.9% iso that I've seen kill disks, and I wouldn't risk it on my laptop, even though its still on warrenty