I'd also like to know. I tried to send those commands (SCSI I think?) to the drive, but it seemed to just ignore them. Heck, it seemed to ignore a huge portion of the different commands I tried to send it.
That matches with my recollection too. I remember getting a specific model of a LiteOn drive specifically to ensure that I had the ability to do this, both for data recovery and because some forms of copy protection abused disc read errors and made reading your own CDs a (kernel blocking) pain under linux. I think the source of `cdparanoia` [1] has some good examples.