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I suggest starting with a good optical drive. If the one you have is not, have a look here.
Once you have decent hardware, look for ripping software that uses libparanoia.
It has been years since I did this stuff, but I don't think much has changed since then.
Thanks.
ddrescue.
Also, maybe look for a CD lens cleaner.
May be hard to find nowadays. An alternative is gently clean the lens with a Qtip slightly moist with distilled water, and dried with the other, dry end.
that was something I tried, to no avail. I used a clean lens cleaner with a dab of distilled water. I am only assuming at this point that the drive is scratched, but to my eyes there is nothing wrong with the CD. They are just maybe a decade old at this point and my cousins want a copy of the data which I intend to send them by ripping the existing CDs.
Quick question, are these burned blank disks, or purchased commercial disks?
I believe they were burned, since we have blanks laying around. The data was migrated from tape I think.
Ok, you may be facing disk rot. Disk rot is much more prevalent on self recorded that commercial recordings.
ddrescue is probably your best bet.There are other options, but I've always had the best results with ddrescue. There is no way to fix disk rot.
The magic comes from hardware more than software, as others have mentioned you want a good burner to do the rips.
Sorry for the rabbit hole, but media archival is its own can of worms that would take hours to dive into, so in general you want an Asus DVD drive that's internal, manufactured between 2004 and 2010, supports 52x CD speeds, doesn't have light scribe, and has the DVD-RW logo on the front bezel. Those are usually the magic drives, and you are generally going to need modified firmware to do some of the more bizarre reads. The Asus BW-16D1HT does Blu-ray and multi region discs, for just DVDs look for one of the DRW-**** drives without light scribe (they have a laser assembly that is higher power to write with, but usually doesn't have as clean of a signal in exchange, not the best for rips)
From there the software depends on your specific workflow. If you are just trying to recover clean disc rips then dd or ddrescue are going to be your friend. Get a disc image, mount it, use the data from the image instead of the disc. For archiving just the media look into MakeMKV, FFMPEG, and Handbrake for ways to encode the DVDs and audio into friendlier formats. Ffmpeg specifically can be scripted very easily and does audio just as well as video, it is the gold standard for transcoding media.
I’ll have to look into compatibility. I happen to have an internal Dell DVD-RW reader, but I think it was made after 2010.
The time frame is mostly to avoid some annoying firmware locks on the drive. Also, that Dell drive is probably a Hitachi or a Liteon rebrand, they don't make drives themselves. It shouldn't matter much for reads, both manufacturers have good and bad drives.
All that being said give it a shot, worse case you still get read errors and you are back to square one.
Rubbing alcohol and a microfiber cloth.
Also, I feel like I’ve had good luck with k3b, though mainly for CDs.
As for drives, as others have said, USB ones tend to be janky; go for an internal. I like my LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray drive.
If it’s a desktop, it should be easy to hook up with SATA, though if you have a newer case, you might need to dangle a cable out the side like I do.
If you have a laptop, though, you’ll probably need a USB adapter, though there might be a hack using an M.2 slot to hook up an SATA PCI-E card.
And the rub should be radial, not circular.
There are devices which sand the top layer to take away the scratches. Mixed results.
Link is first what I found. Sorry it's amazon
Back when they were common toothpaste was supposed to be the best way to get scratches smoothed out.
OMG I remember doing this. It never worked for me though! Not even once. lol
Toothpaste only really works if you apply it to a buffing wheel, and at that point you may as well use an actual polishing compound.
Get the battery powered one, and get a 9v 1amp wall wart (it can run on batteries or the wall wart).
Also buy spare sanding wheels, at least 3, preferably 6.
Source: I have one. It takes 2 minutes to do a full pass. One wheel will do about 100 discs before being too worn out.
Of the ~200 unreadable discs I've run through it, perhaps 5 were still unreadable afterwards (and those may have had a copy protection failure, I'm not really sure). I do know pretty much all were readable afterwards, when they weren't readable before.
Edit: the spray is just water with a drop of dish soap. Use lots of water - when I hear it slow down I know it needs more water on the disc, so give it another shot of spray.