OK so I bought 7290H5 to dump laserlock discs with it. The disc in question is this one http://redump.org/disc/12951/ , which when I originally dumped had too many errors and got marked red. Well I've been trying to dump this disc all day now with marginal success. I got the best dump using clone CD which took several hours and resulted in a dump with 972 errors instead of 1440 previous plextor dump or more than 10000 as with DIC.
I ended up finding the patent for laserlock and seeing how it works, and according to the patent document there are sections with extended "lands" on each side of the readable area between them, this is the "ring" you see. There are 5 "zones" on the discs, there is the 2 normal zones "1 and 2" which are the start and end of the discs. Then 2 more zones "2 and 3" which are these areas of extended "lands" and finally the protected zone "4" which is between the 2 and 3 zones. The protection check routine is supposed to use an angle to move the head or calculate the "good" area of the disc to be read, and this seems to hold true given my findings.
The interesting bit is the errors seem to follow a distinct pattern of a range of "bad" sectors which cannot be read, 1 sector which has no ECC/EDC data in it, and then a block of good sectors, and then rinse and repeat with the larger "good" zone between.
Now I have tried this tool with no positive results in recovering the "bad" sectors at all, not with 10 re-reads, 50 or even 1000. It fails always which leads me to believe that these sectors are indeed extended "lands" and are not readable by any means on any drive. I will attach the EccEdc check log of the dump which more clearly represents what I meant by the pattern, which is very obvious.
Post's attachmentsTrack.img_EccEdc.txt.7z 560.27 kb, 10 downloads since 2019-06-25
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Plextor PX-760A 1.07 (+30) : Plextor PX-716SA 1.11 (+30) : Plextor PX-W5224A 1.04 (+30) : Plextor PX-W4824 1.07 (+30) : Plextor PX-W4012TA 1.07 (+98) : Plextor PX-W1610TA (+99) : Plextor PX-W1210TA 1.10 (+99) : Lite-On LTR-48246S (+6) : Lite-On LTR-52246S (+6) : Lite-On LH-20A1H LL0DN (+6) : BenQ DW1655 BCIB (+618) : ASUS DRW-2014L1 1.02 (+6) : Yamaha CRW-F1 (+733) : Optiarc SA-7290H5 1H44 (+48) : ASUS BW-16D1HT 3.02 (+6)