Reading Data from the Entire Surface of a CD, DVD

Posted by Hypertext on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Hypertext
Published on 2012-09-17T10:30:42Z Indexed on 2012/09/18 21:42 UTC
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compact-disc

Is it possible to retrieve data from the entire surface of a compact disc.

Suppose a CD written with 300MB of data where the remaining 400MB is blank. Normally, computer doesn't bother with the 400MB region when reading it because the filesystem ends at 300MB.

But, is it possible to make the CD drive retrieve data from the rest of the surface. Idea is to retrieve something from outside the image. If possible, true it might return useless 0s or 255s data. But, is it really possible?

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