writes:
It just occured to me that I used to do a nifty thing to protect my
most valuable data from single byte corruption as can be caused by
oxidized memory DIM contacts etc. I would burn the data to a RAW
CDROM image file which includes error correction and just save it to
my hard drive. Once I did that I could open up the CD image in a hex
editor and pepper it full of crap, but then when I would mount it the
error correction would keep it perfectly readable! Pretty cool.

Unfortunately that won't really work.

A CD-ROM image is normally an ISO 9660 image, which doesn't contain
the error correction codes. It only has the 2048-byte data payload of
each sector.

Some software will let you generate a "raw" image (2352 byte sectors
rather than 2048). This does contain the top level of the error
correction codes. But it doesn't have the bottom two layers, or the
interleaving, so by itself it doesn't gain much.

See "The Art of Digital Audio" by Watkinson or "Principles of Digital
Audio" by Pohlman for details of the CD-Audio format (Red Book), or
buy a copy of ISO 60908.

The CD-ROM format is layered on top of the CD-Audio format, as documented
in the Yellow Book. ECMA 130 is equivalent to the relevant portion of
the Yellow Book, and a PDF file can be downloaded at no charge:
http://www.ecma-international.org/pu...s/Ecma-130.htm

If you're worried about data corruption, you are best off keeping multiple
copies of your data, preferrably on separate mediums. And it probably is
worthwhile to either put it in ZIP files (which store a CRC of the file
to detect corruption), or to store an MD5SUM of the file on the same medium.

Eric