Ringed Disc Dumping Guide

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Revision as of 15:25, 28 May 2021

Ringed Discs have physical separators[1], preventing the disc to be properly dumped by typical means. This guide is for data only discs, data + audio tracks needs a different procedure to get the right .cue file.

Dumping guide

Step 1: Try a Plextor + MPF/DIC dump. To get all the information for data + audio you need to actually complete the dump procedure with DIC, clicking on the opened Windows terminal will pause the dumping process. At that point open the disc drive, press enter and let the "dump" go on. DIC will spit out a lot of errors because of course there's no disc in the drive, but pause it again as soon as the ending ring sector it's going to be skipped by dumping procedure. then close the drive, wait some time to let Windows recognize the disc again, and at that point press enter on the terminal window to let the process continue. if everything is correct, the dump will end and generate an incomplete track 1.bin (errors to be noticed inside the eccedc.txt file), but the other tracks from track 2 to the end of the disc, and the cue file of course, should be fine. Of course the ring will cause some c2 error so when you're at that point just close everything and remove the disc with this first step you can obtain still useful data, like the disc offset and the PVD from the maininfo.txt file (you would have to get it manually otherwise).

Step 2: Put the disc in the SOHD-167T drive, and do a copy with CloneCD, that can quickly (not so quickly... but anyway) skip through the ring. from that point on, when you have the clone cd image, you'll have to use the SOHD-167T drive to run the tool called CDArchive[2]. it's a command line tool only, it's not for the faint of heart, and from this point on this will require A LOT OF TIME AND PATIENCE because you need to re-read multiple times backwards from the latest readable sector the drive will make a lot of "grinding" noises, you will need multiple retries, and sometimes you can feel the urge of throwing everything in the trash but in the end you will get some new readable sectors... and at that point, still using cdarchive, you'll need to "merge" the CloneCD .img file with the new extracted sectors.

cdarchive --mode=ext --extrdrive=G --extrstart=279050 --extrend=279094 --extroverread=0 --extrretries=50 --extrskip=1000 --extrdirection=b --extrdiscmode="cd" --extrsectdir="E:\Programmi\CDArchive\pcavol36" --extrrefcue="E:\Programmi\CDArchive\pcavol36.cue"

that's a full command:

--mode could be "ext" or "mer", to extract or merge sectors;
--extrdrive is for the drive letter
--extrstart & end is for the starting and ending sectors
--extroverread i don't have a clue
--extrretries means that every sector will be tested for that specific amount of times. i suggest not going much higher number than 100. let the drive cool down for a bit and then try again
--extrskip i don't have a clue either
--extrdirection should be f for front or b for back, use the "b" all the times
--extrdiscmode is for CD or DVD media
--extrsectdir is the folder where you will place the extracted sectors (remember to create this folder before running this application)
--extrrefcue is for the CloneCD cue file related to the previous image file

another thing: CDArchive needs to be running in a console with administrative privileges write cmd in the W10 search bar, right click on it, open it as administrator, accept to give the privileges, and then use "cd + the folder path" to run the application directly from its folder