I used to enjoy playing around with lossy media such as CDs tapes and usenet, throwing more and more parity at it, and sometimes deliberately abuse the media to introduce more losses, just to see how much could be wrecked and still have a human viewable picture or audio left...
With that said, it would be interesting to see what a modified CD drive would be able to pull from a disc cracked and carefully put together again. Modified, because you'd want it to ignore luxuries like adressing and error correction/reporting and just get a raw bits (or probabilities of a bit or no bit) back..
I imagine it would be impossible to get the tracks aligned again, so it would in best case be randomly jumping to different track and getting stuck like a grammphone skipping tracks...
I wonder how well the metal layer is bonded to the rest of the disc, if a crack and would severely distort it on the rest of the disc too.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
