If a disk looks okay, but will only give you "Read Errors," it is probably physically damaged on a microscopic level. It may have little holes or dents in it, imperfections that are too small for the naked eye to see. You can push past bad spots on a disk by manually rotating the disk inside. If the damage is limited to a small area of the disk, it may be that the damaged segment is the part the drive tries to read first. If you manually rotate the disk a little to the left or right, the new section of disk which you reveal may not have that damage and may there-fore be readable. Keep rotating the disk, a little at a time, until you've found a spot that is readable.
If you never find a readable spot, perhaps you've been duped! Maybe the disk is blank, or it isn't suitable for your computer. Or maybe it's single sided and you've inserted it with the wrong side facing the drive's read/write head.
A disk that you find in the trash bin may hold corporate data, proprietary software, maybe even a tutorial or simulation like we discussed earlier.
You never knew there was an archaeology side to computer hacking, did you? But that's exactly what all of this is; we are looking into people's lives to see what they think about, to find out what's im-portant to them, and to learn from their experiences. Hacking a damaged disk that you have un-earthed from a trash bin will lead you to details you would otherwise never have imagined existed. I highly recommend the exercise for the thrill value, and for the intellectual workout to be gained from this pursuit.
