Mishap cracked CD

I was wanting to install a copy of Corel Wordperfect Office 2000 onto my netbook. I got my disk and the phone rang so I went to answer it. I returned and as I reached for my laptop I leaned over the settee and heard a nasty cracking sound. My elbow had cracked the CD. I googled repairs and the best I found was a guy who suggested sticking a paper label on and using Nero to slow the speed of the DVD player. However I remembered a music CD once virtually exploding inside a DVD player on another PC I had so I was unhappy to try that solution. I then simply googled Wordperfect Office 2000 and found a site with a downloadable ISO of the very disk. I dowloaded it and after a while used Magic ISO to unpack it then I wrote it to a USB stick and was able to install from that onto my netbook. As I had the code from my original disk I was able to activaste it on the netbook. I thgen burned the files to a fresh CD Happy Days!

 

Yes, the stresses in a spinning disk will be quite high, and as you suggest possibly sufficient to shatter a damaged disk.

I suspect the same stress will tend to open the crack when disk is spinning, and although slowing as much as pos would help, the risk of read errors remains high. Whether beyond the error-correcting capacity of the optical drive technology, I do not know!

So good you were able to find an alternative.

I would be pleased to hear if anyone has experience to the contrary, ie success in utilising disk with a crack of such magnitude.

 

Same as a ceiling fan with a missing wing, a cracked disc will wobble and probably break/damage your disc drive. Its not worth it, especially for those computers with hard to find disc drives like older laptops.

My suggestion is that if you break a disc, just download a copy online somewhere. Keep the disc as proof just incase your ISP ever tries sending a letter. I broke my old Windows Vista disc, torrented a copy, got a copyright warning strike from Comcast but they cleared the strike when I sent proof I had a copy just a broken disc.

ISP's are usually cool about it if you show proof of ownership. At least, Comcast and SBC Global was.