Hey there, I've got the gold master of a game on a LOG (Laser Optic Group) CD-R74. It's about 16 years old. My disc drive is unable to identify the media, so I'm unable to back it up currently. Is there some special hardware I need to back up a gold master disc, or are the read difficulties simply a product of the age of the disc? Thanks!
Could be old, or could be in a different format than your drive can understand. What's the system for the game?
If it's a gold master of a game, wouldn't that mean it's identical to retail? What's the point of backing it up?
PC, so should work, right? Is there such a thing as specialized recovery hardware for reading hard-to-read discs? I think it's the master. I want to verify its contents.
Well the "master" is the glass master at the factory. You have an archival quality CDR, not the actual master. Buy an old drive of quality, like a plextor and use alcohol 120%. Set the error retries to a decent number and hope. What color is the bottom? Green, blue, or no color?
Thanks for the information, Assembler. Green underside, and if I hold it up to the light, I can make out the printed details on the topside label showing through the data portion of the disc, which probably isn't a great sign.
In the late 90's when I had just entered college, I had a number of green/gold discs that I burnt with some of my old 3d models, that are no longer readable by ANYTHING- even the original SCSI CD-R that I originally burnt them with. Interestingly, they were not exposed to UV, and were stored in near darkness this entire time.. Others on different media are still readable however. I'd attempt to read the media on anything you can get your hands on as Assembler suggests, but I personally wouldn't keep your hopes up- I've heard that burn speed and disc quality are the main factors in some discs straight-up dying like this, and while most recommendations for burning for consoles at the time was to use 1X speed, there was no real downside in using faster, as long as your ram buffer and drives could keep up, but over time, there may be some downsides.
