ott wrote on 2026-01-29, 08:05:Hi there! […]
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Hi there!
I would like to make contribution to The "Driver CD" for motherboards thread, but the first dumped CD-ROM image comes out with some bad sectors (broken files). The disc turned out to have scratches, but not deep ones.
I tried to take a dump using different CD/DVD-RW drives, and suddenly got opposite results:
- Drive A reads file "X" but fails on "Y".
- Drive B reads file "Y" but fails on "X".
etc.
So, I've got several ISO images of the same CD, but with different sets of bad sectors.
How can I create one without errors? Something like a HEX editor would work?
My first thought is, can you simply extract the ISO files (using 7zip, or even just mounting them in your OS), and then move the working files from each ISO to a folder, then use the contents of the final folder to create a new ISO? I know it isn't exactly an original bit-by-bit image, but if the source media is problematic then compromises may have to be made. Also, it really doesn't seem like it would make any difference with non-bootable media. As long as you make sure to have hidden and system files visible (if on Windows) you should be able to avoid any extra junk being included in the ISO.
Also, if the file or folder created\modified dates end up getting changed, you can change them back pretty easily. This program would probably make the process easy:
https://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Microsoft/N … ileTime/History
Unless there is a simple program to merge ISOs, this is the way I would go. It would have to be far less tedious than hex editing ISO files to repair corruption, and in the end there would be no practical difference. If we were dealing with bootable media or modern operating system images, I would definitely not want anything that had been tampered with unnecessarily, but a 20-30 year old driver CD is pretty low risk. 😀
