Wednesday, November 22, 2006

What is this green gunge on these CDROM disks?

I had about 6 old (but brand new, cello-sealed in jewel case) Sony CD-R's sitting in a dusty corner. Old stuff - 6X max write speed. So I figure I'll use'em up making some backups of some programming work I've been doing lately.

I crack those babies open and look at the media side and there's a greenish gunge creeping all over the surface rendering them unusable. The gunge had a texture to it, not smooth like the normal media surface. Not rough like sandpaper, but you could feel that it wasn't as smooth as the un-gunged part of the surface.

Its not like I've been storing them out in the back yard buried under a pile of leaves with the lizards or something, they'd just been sitting on the shelf in the Batcave.

I tried washing the gunge off with dish soap and warm water. No joy. This gunge is apparently a permanent sort of gunge.

What the heck is this stuff? I feel like I'm living in the X-Files.

3 comments:

Brooke said...

Whoa... I have no frickin' clue. Some kind of mold?

Anonymous said...

Boogers?

RobC said...

CD's are not fond of dampness and have been know to corrode when exposed to damp and corrosive air, I also read of some batches having a faulty plastic formulation that actually ate away the aluminium layer that forms the data retention layer.