How to Clean a Scratched Disc at Home

CDs get scratched, its a fact of life that you have to live with. But thankfully they are very simple to fix, even if you don't have a scratch fixing machine, which are very useful but run rather expensive sometimes. Now one thing to keep in mind is that blu-ray discs should not be cleaned in this way, ever. They have a special scratch resistant layer and trying to clean them with any normal cleaner can damage them even more. Its not worth the risk in my opinion considering how expensive they are.

Now some of these methods could damage your disc, especially if you do it wrong. However, I have used all of these methods and they worked for my CDs so I hope they work for you as well.

Take a non abrasive tooth paste and smear a nice amount on the bottom of your cd that you want to clean. Then let it sit for a minute or two, once this is done rinse off the excess toothpaste and then wipe off the rest. You should always wipe a CD from center to outside and never in a circular motion or any other way you can think of. As you are more likely to damage the disc any other way.

This method is thought to work because the toothpaste fills in the cracks and removes smudges. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me either to be completely honest, but it worked for me before when a simple cleaning didn't work.

This is what I do most of the time is to simply take some eye glasses cleaner and use it on the bottom of the CD and then take a micro fiber cloth on the inside of the CD and wipe to the outter edges. This isn't exactly safe either because it isn't what the cleaning agent was made for but it is a lot more common in a household than any other cleaning agent that can work for it. Obviously this way works best if you have an actual CD scratch filler and cleaning agent.

Take care to wipe off the glasses cleaner soon as it can erode the bottom layer of the CD. Also when you are done you might want to take some water to the bottom as well to make sure you got all the cleaner off there. It could also hurt the laser in your CD player if you leave too much on there.

If you have a lot of discs that you want and need repaired then its about time that you got an actual device that cleans the CDs for you and does it properly. Here are a few of the ones that you can get straight from Amazon that are cheap and very effective, take a look and see if it fits in your budget at least.