Rescuing optical media
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Rescuing optical media can be difficult, due to the many incompatible formats and copy protections that were used. CDs are difficult to image at low-level because most drives do not give access to the raw data.
The following is a table of some available disc dumping tools.
Software
| Software | Supported media | Development status | License | Platforms supported | Drives supported | Output format | Latest Version | Website | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exact Audio Copy | Audio CD | Actively developed | Proprietary | Microsoft Windows | Most | wav/flac + cue | 1.0 beta 3 | [1] | |
| X Lossless Decoder | Audio CD | Actively developed | GPL | Mac OS X | Most | wav/flac + cue | 20130407 | [2] | |
| Morituri | Audio CD | Unmaintained | GPL | Linux | Most | wav/flac + cue | 0.2.3 | [3] | |
| whipper | Audio CD | Actively maintained | GPL | Linux | Most | wav/flac + cue | 0.9.0 | [4] | fork of Morituri |
| RawDump | GC/Wii Optical Disc | Unmaintained | Proprietary | Windows | Certain Hitachi/LG | "ISO" | 2.1 | [5] | |
| FriiDump | GC/Wii Optical Disc | Unmaintained | GPL | Windows and Linux | Certain Hitachi/LG | "ISO" | 0.5.3 | [6] | Includes documentation on dumping method |
| cdrdao | CD-ROM | Actively maintained | GPL | Linux and Mac OS X | Most | cue/bin | 1.2.3 | [7] | Does not properly rip CDs with nonstandard data |
| Trurip | CD-ROM | Unknown | Unreleased | Windows | Certain Plextor | ccd/sub/img | Unknown | [8] | Supposedly supports SafeDisc and other forms of copy protection |
| DiscImageCreator | CD-ROM, GD-ROM, DVD-ROM, others | Actively maintained | Apache | Windows and Linux | Certain Plextor/others | cue / multiple bin | 20191116 | [9] | Believed to produce identical output as TruRip for most discs |
Tools of the trade has a list of other tools for disc dumping.
Redump.org has assembled a guide for disc dumping, available at http://redump.org/guide/.
Linux
- In most cases you can just create an ISO image with k3b.
- Using ddrescue (
ddrescue -b 2048 -n /dev/sr0 image.iso image.logand so on) you can make an exact copy of any DVD/CD; intentionally corrupt sectors will just be replaced by zeros. [10] You then need to remove encryption (including region protection) with dvdbackup. [11] - Some people report good results with k9copy, not available in all repositories.
- See also this blog post which covers the preservation of CD-ROMs and DVDs using the readom, ddrescue and cdrdao tools, and audio CDs using cdparanoia.
- The omimgr tool is a simple GUI-based tool for recovering data from CD-ROMs and DVDs. It wraps around readom and ddrescue.