What is the best way to clean/repair a PS2 disc?
If this is indeed even my problem. I have had a PS2 for a while but rarely used it. My son has finally gotten to the age where he is starting to use it, and he got several games for Xmas. There is one that he has been playing a lot lately, and he brought it to a friend’s house today. When he brought it home, it didn’t look like it was any more scratched or dirty than it had been, maybe some more finger smudges, but I wiped the surface clean w/ a soft dry cloth first. Anyway, there was a loading screen that came on and it just kept sitting there, and finally we got a disc load error, and it said checking disc, but went right back to that loading screen and kept trying to load but went nowhere. I don’t know if it really is the disc, if it’s scratched, or just has some dirt I can’t see or if it’s the laser on my PS2 or what. What do you hardcore PS2 veterans do when a disc stops working?
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5 Answers
Take a wet paper towel and wipe the disc starting at the center and making outward motions, never just in circles.
I don’t do this but my girlfriend will put stick deodorant on scratched discs then buff them. I guess it fill gouges or something. It works. I however am afraid to do this with my electronics.
I have used Windex but I’ve heard that it damages the disc. I don’t really care, it’s usually a rental DVD anyway.
If you just want to clean the disk, don’t be afraid of using soap and water. Neither will damage your disk. Just be sure to clean it in a circular motion around the center hole. If you accidentally scratch the disk, it will be less likely to have detrimental effects if the scratch goes “with the grain”.
As for repairing disc scratches, I have heard that toothpaste can be used to buff the scratch out, but I have not had much luck with this technique. Try it at your own risk.
toothpaste actually does work. But it has to be gel. It doesn’t matter what disk it is, CD/DVD. And as aanuszek1 said, you have to clean it centre-out. I have a dvd player that just plays some disks and not others, even if they are brand new. So it could actually be the laser if the disk seems fine.
Another thing you could try (though unless your PS2 is chipped it won’t work in this particular case) is copying the disk and playing from the copy. Sometimes even if the original disk is scratched, the data gets copied properly and the new disk plays fine (this works on music CDs for example).
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