Bad Blocks

A friend asked for help. Nearly a thousand CD-Rs had surfaced from a closet, and he wanted them turned into data before they died. What was on them? Old games, he said. I didn't ask further. He didn't offer.

When CD-R drives first showed up, the YAMAHA one I wanted ran past a hundred thousand yen. Botch a burn and you'd made a coaster. A blank ran maybe five hundred yen apiece — my memory's shaky — but it wasn't cheap enough to throw away on a whim. They told you not to touch the machine mid-write, so you held your breath and watched the progress bar. One stray background process could wreck the burn. There was even freeware that killed every needless app and dropped the machine into a dedicated burn mode. It was a delicate thing. These days I burn a disc on an external DVD drive with one hand while doing something else entirely. A different world.

The media had factions. TDK's tough-coat, or Taiyo Yuden. Which dye, which coating would last — everyone argued it on flimsy grounds. Twenty years on, we're grading the exam. Some discs read clean. Some are already gone. Mostly the expensive ones are still alive. The cheap blanks went unreadable even back then, so I only ever bought the good stuff.

Copy protection back then sometimes meant deliberately writing broken blocks. Someone said it at the time: that's not a CD by any industrial standard anymore — it's a disc with data on it. A Red Book violation wearing a CD's face. Ordinary software couldn't rip it.

DiscJuggler. CDRWIN. CloneCD. Names that land on no one now. In the end CloneCD could pull even the intentionally broken blocks and reproduce the wounds when it burned. I never knew how. I just remember the idea — copy the scar as a scar.

So now the friend feeds discs to a drive and lets Claude run the whole thing — ripping, sorting, coaxing the unreadable ones into giving something up. About eight in ten still read clean, he says.

Twenty years ago, these platters were scarred on purpose so no one could copy them. Twenty years later, what stands between him and the copy isn't the scar someone engineered. It's the scar time left on its own. The toughest copy protection of all turned out to be the disc's own decay.