RawDump Time! (picture 400KB)

I have a GDR-8163B and GDR-8164B for dumping Wii/GC discs.

Is there any advantage over dumping disc's using these drive instead of the wii? I can imagine it's a lot faster maybe? I always used a wii for dumping my own discs and that can take quite a bit of time to complete.

Archerite said:

Is there any advantage over dumping disc's using these drive instead of the wii? I can imagine it's a lot faster maybe? I always used a wii for dumping my own discs and that can take quite a bit of time to complete.

Click to expand...

Nope. It is by far(!) slower than a Wii. The different sector structure of Nintendo Optical Discs (NOD) is what makes them inaccessible even on sector level. Consumer drives do -- by default -- not offer reading the RAW data of DVDs (not even the semi-RAW mode that is supported on CDs).
On physical level NOD are DVD. On logical level not. From the perspective of the drive firmware every single sector of a NOD is a unrecoverable read error and the drive will not deliver any data. But to decide that a sector is corrupted beyond repair the drive already copied the data to the own RAM.
What RawDump does is: Read a sector, wait for error, ask via debug commands for drive RAM content. Then "resolve the error" (derive actual sector content) and ask the drive to continue with the next sector, wait for error....
RawDump incorporates a few tricks to have a constant stream of data rather than single sectors which would take eternity (you'll find a bit about this in the documentation and source code of the very similar FriiDump).
In the best case you will get about 2500MB/hour. Realistically only 2000MB/hour.

On physical level a full-sized PC drive should be able to dump a Wii disc in about 5 to 8 min (6.4x to 16x CAV mode) like any standard DVD.
Maybe(!) a setup like this one could do it:
https://debugmo.de/2007/07/read-your-dvds-the-raw-way/

Having a debug reader allowing access to the absolute RAW EFM+ data stream would be awesome!
=====

Practical reasons for using PC drives:

• Somebody does not have a Wii/GC
• Scratched discs
  • I got the LG drive successfully and Redump verified copy original NOD in very bad condition where all Wii/GC gave up.
  • Console drives are often garbage.

Other than that... just use the Wii!

I wonder if the hacked BD drives can be used for this, after all I think they are modified for direct sector reading to implement the BD security stuff in userland.

gudenau said:

I wonder if the hacked BD drives can be used for this, after all I think they are modified for direct sector reading to implement the BD security stuff in userland.

Click to expand...

No idea if it could do anything. It would be especially interesting to get access to Wii U discs, which are probably BDs on physical level (but not on logical level). The old RawDump drives are strictly CD/DVD readers only.
LibreDrive isn't open source. I believe it is using undocumented commands to get access to sectors without proper authentication (which only a licensed Ultra-HD BD player application should be able to send). Said loophole was closed with newer firmware revisions and can be re-introduced with "hacked" firmware or with downgrades (circumventing some kind of anti-downgrade).
In "LibreDrive mode" MakeMKV can access encrypted 4K video material and disable riplock for encrypted DVDs/BDs. I have a LibreDrive compatible and UHD friendly drive (non-hacked, non-downgraded, came on low firmware version) but no 4K BDs to test this functionality.

To my knowledge this special mode does nothing to gain access to more data per sector (RAW access). It will probably retrieve normal 2048bytes per sector ("cooked") requiring the drive to do it's normal job: EFM+ decoding, low level error detection/correction, descrambling (not the copy protection scrambling), high level error detection/correction. Since the data fields for GC/Wii discs are slightly shifted, this "reflexes" of a PC drive do not work. We would need access to the data before the low level data processing.

KleinesSinchen said:

No idea if it could do anything. It would be especially interesting to get access to Wii U discs, which are probably BDs on physical level (but not on logical level). The old RawDump drives are strictly DVD only.
LibreDrive isn't open source. I believe it is using undocumented commands to get access to sectors without proper authentication (which only a licensed Ultra-HD BD player application should be able to send). Said loophole was closed with newer firmware revisions and can be re-introduced with "hacked" firmware or with downgrades (circumventing some kind of anti-downgrade).
In "LibreDrive mode" MakeMKV can access encrypted 4K video material and disable riplock for encrypted DVDs/BDs. I have a LibreDrive compatible and UHD friendly drive (non-hacked, non-downgraded, came on low firmware version) but no 4K BDs to test this functionality.

To my knowledge this special mode does nothing to gain access to more data per sector (RAW access). It will probably retrieve normal 2048bytes per sector ("cooked") requiring the drive to do it's normal job: EFM+ decoding, low level error detection/correction, descrambling (not the copy protection scrambling), high level error detection/correction. Since the data fields for GC/Wii discs are slightly shifted, this "reflexes" of a PC drive do not work. We would need access to the data before the low level data processing.

Click to expand...

Huh, interesting.

The Wii U drives are SATA, but IIRC they don't use standard commands.