As the title says why does toothpaste fix disks
In: 2049
While toothpaste *can* work, I don’t recommend it. I recommend Meguiar’s PlastX instead, because it’s specifically designed to be abrasive to plastics.
Also, for best results, get a microfiber cloth and use that to rub in the PlastX. You’ll need to give it quite a bit of “elbow grease”. Be careful not to crack the disc or let it slide around on the surface you’re polishing it on, ESPECIALLY if you’re using this trick on a CD.
Why? Because the “data layer” on CDs is very close to the back of the disc (the “label side”). If you slide a CD on a dirty surface, you will scratch it. If you scratch the side that the laser reads, you can (usually) polish it back up to some degree. If you scratch the side with the label, and the scratch is deep enough to damage the data layer, that’s it. You can’t fix it, and your only hope is to pray that the damage is small enough that the disc’s built-in error-correction can interpolate what was in the gap. [This is a diagram of what I mean](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ad/Comparison_CD_DVD_HDDVD_BD.svg/1280px-Comparison_CD_DVD_HDDVD_BD.svg.png)
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