Misc Wii Discs are made of steel

[Stealphie]

So, I was looking through some stuff and I found my copy of Mario Party 9 inside a broken wii. It was this fucking scratched. Then I put it on my wiiu to test if it worked. Spoiler alert, it did.
How the fuck does this still work. This disc is 9 years old, has been abused and played for atleast 300 hours. This is the most scratched disc I have that still works.

 

[Deleted member 546149]

So, I was looking through some stuff and I found my copy of Mario Party 9 inside a broken wii. It was this fucking scratched. Then I put it on my wiiu to test if it worked. Spoiler alert, it did.
How the fuck does this still work. This disc is 9 years old, has been abused and played for atleast 300 hours. This is the most scratched disc I have that still works.

If it was steel, how can it be scanned?

 

[DBlaze]

no issues at all when playing through it as well?

 

[KleinesSinchen]

So, I was looking through some stuff and I found my copy of Mario Party 9 inside a broken wii. It was this fucking scratched. Then I put it on my wiiu to test if it worked. Spoiler alert, it did.
How the fuck does this still work. This disc is 9 years old, has been abused and played for atleast 300 hours. This is the most scratched disc I have that still works.

I know this is inside EOF. I'll answer in a serious way though:

Wii discs are not "made of steel" but very easy to damage. A piece of cardboard can make them unreadable.

Can we get a better picture in higher resolution of this? I know it is hard to get good pictures of optical discs (and they often look far worse in reality than on photo).

A quick look on illegal ROM sites gave me the information that Mario Party 9 WBFS is between about 500MB and 1000MB (Europe/PAL being the largest version, probably because of multiple languages on one disc).
Since Wii discs are similar to standard DVDs and have about the same (memory) size, the chances of random scratches hitting the padding are much higher than hitting the real data. As long as there are no circular scratches the error correction on optical discs does a pretty good job with most scratches.

Did you verify with CleanRip if the disc can be read completely?

Consider resurfacing the disc.

Good luck and have fun!

 

[Stealphie]

no issues at all when playing through it as well?

Nope. Works perfectly.

 

[Vila_]

yeah, cd's and dvd's are pretty durable, thats one of the main reasons they where adopted as the srandard for music, movies and programs.

 

[KleinesSinchen]

yeah, cd's and dvd's are pretty durable, thats one of the main reasons they where adopted as the srandard for music, movies and programs.

Durable? Optical media? Are you sure about this?
Try this on some discs (obviously use garbage discs you don't need anymore!!):

• Drop one with the egde on concrete (or throw it like a Frisbee against a wall). Good chance it'll shatter at the edge. DVDs might come apart in rare cases (they're like a glued sandwich and can be separated with a sharp knife and a bit of patience)
• Don't get me started on organic dye CD-R and DVD±R and UV-light…

CDs are more prone to certain kinds damage:

• Scratch a CD (not DVD) on the label side. Damaging the upper side/the protective lacquer → exitus
  • Even if there's no data in this spot you get a high chance of future disc rot with a small damage like this
• Put a strong adhesive tape on the label side of a CD and rip it off. You might have the data layer in your hands, ready for the microscope
• Write (yourself) to a CD with an aggressive marker instead of a CD pen. It might eat itself through the lacquer and destroy the data layer
• Write (with CD burner) something in Mode2/Form2 (less error correction for more data on VCD/SVCD) on a CD-R and scratch the shiny side a bit (not the label side this time). The video will most likely play. The PC will most likely complain when copying the data back to HDD.

Sure, all these examples are abuse and/or carelessness. Sadly such things happen. I wouldn't recommend trying this with any data storage medium, but I don't think an average optical disc would have survived while an almost sealed NAND¹ cart has pretty good chances.

Careless children can ruin expensive game discs fast. Expensive game disc → Trash. (By the way… To the producers: Thanks for the copy protection markings that stop me from backing up the expensive games I payed for.)
Ask @Alexander1970 about his experiences. What idea children might get when they have a bunch of DVDs and a Wii…


I don't think optical discs are durable. But they are cheap. Really cheap to mass-produce. Way cheaper than chips. So cheap AOL produced their free advertising junk discs in quantities I do not even want to think about. Also: CD/DVD offered a great amount of data storage earlier than flash memory. If treated with utmost care and if there is no manufacturing defect, pressed discs seem to have a pretty long lifespan.



___________________
¹ Wario Ware D.I.Y is a special case. Other DS games have MASK-ROM which is much more durable. Wario surviving this surprised me.

 

[Dud]

That, my friend, is the power of Nintendium.


No, but seriously, you're pretty lucky. I've had a couple of Wii discs gone bad past startup with the "Disc Cannot be Read: Refer to Wii Operations Manual" black screen.

 

[Chary]

jet fuel cant melt steel discs

 

[Julie_Pilgrim]

jet fuel cant melt steel discs

wii-leven

 

[slaphappygamer]

Mario Party 9 killed your wii! That’s WiiCked!

Hopefully, you have a backup of that game. Not sure that disc can take much more abuse.

 

[Vila_]

Durable? Optical media? Are you sure about this?
Try this on some discs (obviously use garbage discs you don't need anymore!!):

• Drop one with the egde on concrete (or throw it like a Frisbee against a wall). Good chance it'll shatter at the edge. DVDs might come apart in rare cases (they're like a glued sandwich and can be separated with a sharp knife and a bit of patience)
• Don't get me started on organic dye CD-R and DVD±R and UV-light…

CDs are more prone to certain kinds damage:

• Scratch a CD (not DVD) on the label side. Damaging the upper side/the protective lacquer → exitus
  • Even if there's no data in this spot you get a high chance of future disc rot with a small damage like this
• Put a strong adhesive tape on the label side of a CD and rip it off. You might have the data layer in your hands, ready for the microscope
• Write (yourself) to a CD with an aggressive marker instead of a CD pen. It might eat itself through the lacquer and destroy the data layer
• Write (with CD burner) something in Mode2/Form2 (less error correction for more data on VCD/SVCD) on a CD-R and scratch the shiny side a bit (not the label side this time). The video will most likely play. The PC will most likely complain when copying the data back to HDD.

Sure, all these examples are abuse and/or carelessness. Sadly such things happen. I wouldn't recommend trying this with any data storage medium, but I don't think an average optical disc would have survived while an almost sealed NAND¹ cart has pretty good chances.

Careless children can ruin expensive game discs fast. Expensive game disc → Trash. (By the way… To the producers: Thanks for the copy protection markings that stop me from backing up the expensive games I payed for.)
Ask @Alexander1970 about his experiences. What idea children might get when they have a bunch of DVDs and a Wii…


I don't think optical discs are durable. But they are cheap. Really cheap to mass-produce. Way cheaper than chips. So cheap AOL produced their free advertising junk discs in quantities I do not even want to think about. Also: CD/DVD offered a great amount of data storage earlier than flash memory. If treated with utmost care and if there is no manufacturing defect, pressed discs seem to have a pretty long lifespan.



___________________
¹ Wario Ware D.I.Y is a special case. Other DS games have MASK-ROM which is much more durable. Wario surviving this surprised me.

Agreed although from past experiance, I've had extremley scratched disks that still worked while having accidentally droped a usb stick in water and it not working, though I do agree that overall cd's are more fragile than other mediums.

 

[Gronbar]

Data are stored on the top layer, under are only reflective layer.

 

[KleinesSinchen]

Agreed although from past experiance, I've had extremley scratched disks that still worked while having accidentally droped a usb stick in water and it not working, though I do agree that overall cd's are more fragile than other mediums.

Optical discs may look horrible and still work perfectly (and the opposite: one scratch that doesn't look to bad and no luck)
My experience is that drives in consoles aren't very good at reading scratched discs.

Data are stored on the top layer, under are only reflective layer.

The position of the data layer is not the same for CD / DVD / BD:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Comparison_CD_DVD_HDDVD_BD.svg