Rescuinig severely damaged VCD

[Mangopango]

I have a badly scratched VCD that will play for only the first 10 minutes of it's 60 minute length on my AV system's DVD player. There is no way to bypass or skip over the bad area. I can also partially play the VCD in my PC's DVD-ROM drive using PowerDVD for viewing. However, with PowerDVD I can click on the navigational slider at a point past the bad area (at about 20 minutes into the VCD) and view the rest of the VCD.

I have tried to recover the video using Isobuster 1.3 and VCDGear 3.50a without success -- my DVD-ROM drive(s) freeze at the 10 minute mark and doesn't progress further.

Are there any other approaches I can try? It seems logical to me that since I can access the portion past the damaged area with the PowerDVD player that I should be able to extract the good part!

[SaSi]

Perhaps you can salvage all the disk.

Use cotton or soft cloth and white toothbrush and wipe around the scratched area in circular motions. Don't use any water while you are scrubbing.

Insist where the scratches are deepest. It may take a while for deeper scratches but shallow ones disappear after a couple of minutes.

After 3-4 minutes of wiping the scratched area, wash with medium warm water and wipe dry with a soft towel. Playback the disk on the PC to check for improvement. (Don't bother trying on the standalone player, many scratched disks won't play on the DVD players but play fine on the PCs. Also, use the CD recorder to test it. They appear to be better in reading).

You may have to repeat this a couple of times. If the scratches are really deep, consider using a cutting paste or car polish cream. They have similar properties with toothpaste, only stronger effects. With toothpaste you won't harm the surface no matter how strong you wipe. With polish paste you need to be softer in polishing.

This method has worked for me whenever I needed it (a couple of times) with disks scratched by sand and on a hard surface.

[Mangopango]

Perhaps I didn't emphasize enough the severity of the damage to my VCD. The "scratch" was made by a box cutter blade and is so deep that there is no possibility of polishing or sanding it out. But, still, PowerDVD plays the parts before and after the damage just fine.

[vitualis]

Try CloneCD and try to make an image of the disc onto your HDD and tell it to ignore errors rather than halt.

Regards.