DiscForge is a clean-room, open-source (GPL-3.0-or-later) toolkit for preserving optical media — CD, DVD, and Blu-ray — built around a single non-negotiable rule: every output is proven correct against independent evidence, or the operation is refused outright rather than silently producing something that might be corrupt. That "provably correct or declined" ethos runs through every layer of the tool, from how it reads a disc to how it signs off on the result.
On the dumping side, DiscForge does preservation-grade extraction with a sync-gate integrity check that catches a specific, nasty failure class: drives that report SUCCESS while silently zero-filling audio-read-as-data. Every raw extraction ends with an automatic independent re-read audit of what was actually written — not just what the drive claimed. Track-aware whole-disc dumping walks the TOC properly, so mixed-mode discs (like PS1 games with a data track plus audio tracks) are captured as one atomic, correctly-cued image instead of one flattened span. A dump can leave the drive with a signed (ECDSA P-256) Merkle-tree certificate — the disc identity, drive and firmware, settings, per-span grades, and a hash tree over every sector — so anyone can later verify any single 2KB sector against the original dump event without needing the whole image or re-hashing anything.
Beyond the initial dump, DiscForge builds institutional knowledge and forensic depth most tools don't attempt: a Drive Dossier that accumulates each drive's real observed quirks (mute signatures, unreliable C2 pointers, confirmed read offsets) across sessions rather than relying on a static reference table; Pressing DNA, an offset-sensitive fingerprint that tells two physical pressings of the same title apart (geometry, pregaps, MCN/ISRC, write-offset signatures) where a content hash alone can't; Disc MRI, which renders per-sector read evidence as a polar heatmap on the actual disc geometry so damage becomes something you can see rather than infer from a log; and Disc Actuary, which fits a decay model to a disc's error-growth history over time and ranks a collection by which discs are dying fastest.
Format-wise it reads and converts a wide range of disc image types (bin/cue, CDI, GDI, NRG, MDS, CCD, CSO/ZSO, RVZ/NKit), creates and verifies CHD (not just reads it), and interoperates with Aaru's own AaruFormat — reading uncompressed, LZMA, and FLAC-compressed images with every block checked against its stored CRC-64, and writing uncompressed AaruFormat back out. It can list and extract files from ISO9660/Joliet/Rock Ridge, UDF, FAT, exFAT, NTFS, ext2/3/4, and HFS volumes, including cross-filesystem verification on hybrid discs. For the Redump/AccurateRip community it generates cuesheets, matches against Logiqx DATs with explicit evidence-strength labeling, verifies audio rips against AccurateRip, and packages submissions.
On the recovery and authoring side, a one-command damage assessment grades an image INTACT/RECOVERABLE/DAMAGED/UNREADABLE with concrete next steps and an HTML report, alongside filesystem-constrained salvage planning. DiscForge can also master and burn: ISO9660/Joliet/Rock Ridge authoring with hybrid BIOS+UEFI boot, automatic DVD-9 layer-break planning, and — its most distinctive burning capability — RAW DAO-96 burning that recreates sub-channel data and verifies the result byte-for-byte against a rebuilt golden image via consensus read-back, something almost nothing else in the field does (Aaru and DiscImageCreator don't burn at all).
The GUI and hardware I/O (SPTI/IMAPI2 drive access, burning) are Windows-only today; the analysis, conversion, and filesystem CLI runs natively on Linux as well, with a Linux SG_IO hardware layer in progress. The codebase is entirely clean-room — built from public documentation and observed drive/format behavior, never from disassembly of protected code — and explicitly never strips, decrypts, or circumvents copy protection; it detects and preserves it. It carries an extensive automated test suite (2,400+ tests as of the last public release) including reference-validated codec implementations checked byte-for-byte against liblzma, a reference FLAC encoder, and ssdeep. Compared head-to-head against Aaru, DiscImageCreator, redumper, IsoBuster, and other established tools, DiscForge is currently the only one in the field offering a signed, sector-provable dump certificate, a per-drive institutional-memory dossier, and longitudinal media-rot forecasting — while still matching the specialists on their own core strengths in most other areas.
On the dumping side, DiscForge does preservation-grade extraction with a sync-gate integrity check that catches a specific, nasty failure class: drives that report SUCCESS while silently zero-filling audio-read-as-data. Every raw extraction ends with an automatic independent re-read audit of what was actually written — not just what the drive claimed. Track-aware whole-disc dumping walks the TOC properly, so mixed-mode discs (like PS1 games with a data track plus audio tracks) are captured as one atomic, correctly-cued image instead of one flattened span. A dump can leave the drive with a signed (ECDSA P-256) Merkle-tree certificate — the disc identity, drive and firmware, settings, per-span grades, and a hash tree over every sector — so anyone can later verify any single 2KB sector against the original dump event without needing the whole image or re-hashing anything.
Beyond the initial dump, DiscForge builds institutional knowledge and forensic depth most tools don't attempt: a Drive Dossier that accumulates each drive's real observed quirks (mute signatures, unreliable C2 pointers, confirmed read offsets) across sessions rather than relying on a static reference table; Pressing DNA, an offset-sensitive fingerprint that tells two physical pressings of the same title apart (geometry, pregaps, MCN/ISRC, write-offset signatures) where a content hash alone can't; Disc MRI, which renders per-sector read evidence as a polar heatmap on the actual disc geometry so damage becomes something you can see rather than infer from a log; and Disc Actuary, which fits a decay model to a disc's error-growth history over time and ranks a collection by which discs are dying fastest.
Format-wise it reads and converts a wide range of disc image types (bin/cue, CDI, GDI, NRG, MDS, CCD, CSO/ZSO, RVZ/NKit), creates and verifies CHD (not just reads it), and interoperates with Aaru's own AaruFormat — reading uncompressed, LZMA, and FLAC-compressed images with every block checked against its stored CRC-64, and writing uncompressed AaruFormat back out. It can list and extract files from ISO9660/Joliet/Rock Ridge, UDF, FAT, exFAT, NTFS, ext2/3/4, and HFS volumes, including cross-filesystem verification on hybrid discs. For the Redump/AccurateRip community it generates cuesheets, matches against Logiqx DATs with explicit evidence-strength labeling, verifies audio rips against AccurateRip, and packages submissions.
On the recovery and authoring side, a one-command damage assessment grades an image INTACT/RECOVERABLE/DAMAGED/UNREADABLE with concrete next steps and an HTML report, alongside filesystem-constrained salvage planning. DiscForge can also master and burn: ISO9660/Joliet/Rock Ridge authoring with hybrid BIOS+UEFI boot, automatic DVD-9 layer-break planning, and — its most distinctive burning capability — RAW DAO-96 burning that recreates sub-channel data and verifies the result byte-for-byte against a rebuilt golden image via consensus read-back, something almost nothing else in the field does (Aaru and DiscImageCreator don't burn at all).
The GUI and hardware I/O (SPTI/IMAPI2 drive access, burning) are Windows-only today; the analysis, conversion, and filesystem CLI runs natively on Linux as well, with a Linux SG_IO hardware layer in progress. The codebase is entirely clean-room — built from public documentation and observed drive/format behavior, never from disassembly of protected code — and explicitly never strips, decrypts, or circumvents copy protection; it detects and preserves it. It carries an extensive automated test suite (2,400+ tests as of the last public release) including reference-validated codec implementations checked byte-for-byte against liblzma, a reference FLAC encoder, and ssdeep. Compared head-to-head against Aaru, DiscImageCreator, redumper, IsoBuster, and other established tools, DiscForge is currently the only one in the field offering a signed, sector-provable dump certificate, a per-drive institutional-memory dossier, and longitudinal media-rot forecasting — while still matching the specialists on their own core strengths in most other areas.
