My Conquest to Read a CD in 2021

CD-ROM has been around for decades and it was one of the most important storage media during the 90s. It is used in almost every possible way especially with software that comes only in a CD-ROM. If you’re one of the cool kid in town that owns a CD burner, you’re practically a pirate. Well, I mean sharing music, right? Leaving that aside, it’s the year 2021 and I did not expect to receive a CD-ROM and oh boy it gave me a hard time trying to access its contents.

So my wife is at her final trimesters and we went to a sonographer to have a growth scan done. They have all sorts of crazy technology thrown at your face. Conventional 2D scanning? Pffft, that’s so yesterday. They’re marketing 3D, 4D, 5D or whatever dimension they’re coming from, basically, anything that goes beyond 3D is still 3D just higher resolution. I mean 4D, 5D sells better than HD 3D, right?

Everything went well and at the end of the scan, we got a CD-ROM copy containing the video and screenshots. CD-ROM in 2021. I was a bit reluctant at first because I haven’t been using a CD-ROM for more than 5 years. Since I did keep a CD reader at home so I thought it is alright as I could just copy the content and save it elsewhere. So here’s my screw up, I should’ve trusted my instinct and asked the sonographer to save the files into a USB flash drive.

When I got home and tried to fire up my CD reader, surprise, the thing died. Technically I still can force eject the tray but it just won’t read the disc at all. Presumably, the rotor died after leaving it unused for years. At this point, it is easier for me just to call the sonographer and ask them to upload the files to the cloud storage but hey it wouldn’t be fun if I don’t explore it further once again experience the sound of a spinning CD-ROM.

The next day I brought the disc to my office since I do have an ancient Acer PC kept in the storeroom for reasons. It sports a legendary AMD Athlon CPU so you can pretty much guess the age of this thing. The PC is still able to post without any issue but the CD reader was not detected. Opening the chassis reveals that truth as both the 4-pin Molex and IDE cable were missing. I believe I did some upgrade to this machine back then converting the IDE HDD to SATA HDD. In the progress, I changed the PSU to a semi-modular one and threw out the Molex and IDE cable, getting ready to embrace the SATA future. You see, that was a few years back and that time I already decided not to use the CD reader.

When things start to look bleak and hopeless… Thanks to my colleague, Kok Kee, he jumps in to rescue by bringing along his SATA/IDE to USB converter which technically allows you to access the data on a SATA or IDE drive through USB, given if you’re able to supply the power to the storage device. So we hook it up to a PSU and jump-start it via the hotwire method. By the way, this whole setup is extremely sketchy because the adapter itself is extremely old and the case has become sticky due to it’s deteriorated “soft touch” coating. *that’s why I hate this kind of soft-touch coating*

Nonetheless, the adapter works like charm as the PC was able to detect the CD reader. unfortunately, the tray was stuck and trust me, we did use a pin to force eject but it just won’t budge. So we partially destroyed the front cover and that did the trick and freed up the tray. Surprisingly it is still able to load and eject the disc without any issue.

Now the million-dollar question, am I able to extract the photos and videos out of the CD-ROM? Unfortunately, the answer is No. Sadly the CD reader was not able to read anything out of the disc and we ran out of options that is available for use in the office. At this point, some of you might be questioning the rationale behind my decisions. Why do I waste so much time on old broken components? Why I don’t just bring the disc to any PC shops and request for help? You see, it is all for the sake of exploration, to look for the sense of fulfilment when your contraption works.

Hope you guys enjoyed it even though at the end I have to rely on a friend’s help, borrowing his working CD player to copy out all the media files. That just goes to show how businesses should just ditch CD-ROM at this point and go for USB flash drives. Some of these business services are costing over hundreds and thousand ringgits. Even requesting customers to provide a USB flash drive is a way more eco-friendly option. Otherwise, just use cloud storage.