Fixing CDs/DVDs with Pledge

A few years ago my brother bought Dynasty Warriors 5 for the PS2, he couldn’t play it all the way to the end due to a small accident involving my father and my uncle, they kinda stepped on the controller’s cable and that pulled our PS2 our of its place and fell on the floor, the disk was running so you can guess the outcome…

Anyway, I tried diferent things, cleaning it with Windex, using Skip Dr., but nothing seemed to work, the console would not recognize the disk.

A few days ago I was looking for some ideas to make a cheap laptop stand for my mother’s laptop, I was going through some tutorials at instructables when I notice a post about fixing cds and dvds, I read them real quick but I wasn’t looking for that so I just went back to the other tutorials.

So, my brother brought up the subject a few days ago and then I remembered something about some fix by using a banana. I didn’t have a banana to spare, so I went online and read another tutorial about smoothing a dvd/cd with Pledge, and I happened to have Pledge at home.

The tutorial is pretty simple: you shake the can, spray the cd/dvd, then using a soft cloth you wipe it off going from the center outwards (don’t wipe it off in a circular motion as that’s how the data is read).

That’s it, it works now, although the console took a really long time reading the disk, I was about to call it a day when the opening credits played on the screen 🙂

What Pledge will do is fill in the scratches and stop most of the skips. However, if the scratch is really bad, or too deep, it may not work. If this doesn’t work there are other alternatives, some involve using toothpaste (the plain white kind) the same way I used Pledge.

There’s also a tutorial involving Brasso, a metal polish what will pretty much eat away the plastic over the tracks and minimize the size of the scratches, however you will have to do this outside or in a well ventilated area, it seems the smell is pretty strong.

If you have data in the cd/dvd you might want to get a data recovery software as soon as you manage to make it work or kinda work, you can find some really good suggestions at Makeuseof.com.