Rescuing optical media

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Rescuing optical media can be difficult, due to the many incompatible formats and copy protections that were used. CDs are difficult to image at low-level because most drives do not give access to the raw data.

The following is a table of some available disc dumping tools.

Software

Software Supported media Development status License Platforms supported Drives supported Output format Latest Version Website Notes
Exact Audio Copy Audio CD Actively developed Proprietary Microsoft Windows Most wav/flac + cue 1.0 beta 3 [1]
X Lossless Decoder Audio CD Actively developed GPL Mac OS X Most wav/flac + cue 20130407 [2]
Morituri Audio CD Unmaintained GPL Linux Most wav/flac + cue 0.2.3 [3]
whipper Audio CD Actively maintained GPL Linux Most wav/flac + cue 0.9.0 [4] fork of Morituri
RawDump GC/Wii Optical Disc Unmaintained Proprietary Windows Certain Hitachi/LG "ISO" 2.1 [5]
FriiDump GC/Wii Optical Disc Unmaintained GPL Windows and Linux Certain Hitachi/LG "ISO" 0.5.3 [6] Includes documentation on dumping method
cdrdao CD-ROM Actively maintained GPL Linux and Mac OS X Most cue/bin 1.2.3 [7] Does not properly rip CDs with nonstandard data
Trurip CD-ROM Unknown Unreleased Windows Certain Plextor ccd/sub/img Unknown [8] Supposedly supports SafeDisc and other forms of copy protection
DiscImageCreator CD-ROM, GD-ROM, DVD-ROM, others Actively maintained Apache Windows and Linux Certain Plextor/others cue / multiple bin 20191116 [9] Believed to produce identical output as TruRip for most discs

Tools of the trade has a list of other tools for disc dumping.

Redump.org has assembled a guide for disc dumping, available at http://redump.org/guide/.

Linux

  • In most cases you can just create an ISO image with k3b.
  • Using ddrescue (ddrescue -b 2048 -n /dev/sr0 image.iso image.log and so on) you can make an exact copy of any DVD/CD; intentionally corrupt sectors will just be replaced by zeros. [10] You then need to remove encryption (including region protection) with dvdbackup. [11]
  • Some people report good results with k9copy, not available in all repositories.
  • See also this blog post which covers the preservation of CD-ROMs and DVDs using the readom, ddrescue and cdrdao tools, and audio CDs using cdparanoia.
  • The omimgr tool is a simple GUI-based tool for recovering data from CD-ROMs and DVDs. It wraps around readom and ddrescue.