Comment by iforgotpassword

Only tangentially related, but are there any projects out there that modify CD or DVD readers to make it possible to read the raw (analog) pits and lands from the disc? When I was rescuing the last batch of burned CDs from my teen years a few years ago I unsurprisingly had some with lots of read errors. Googling around only lead me to forum threads where people recommended certain drives that would be very good at error recovery, but I thought it might be even better if you could get the raw stream from the disc and then do all the EFM reversal etc in software with more advanced analysis, brute forcing etc. But nothing of this kind seemed to exist.