[sho]

Coming back to this, having read some of the (great!) replies, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that in theory, this sounds possible, and fun, but highly impractical. I'll assume that by "scan" you mean a high end "flatbed scanner" optical scan which would return a 2D bitmap.

It's impractical because the resolution required to retrieve the data "flatbed scanner style" is comically high, perhaps 50k dpi, far beyond the capability of any commercial unit and well into scanning microscope territory. Sure, from my understanding, it looks technically possible. But it would be a very significant and costly project just to assemble the image in the first place. Even if you had that, the resulting file would be hilariously huge (something like 122GB), extremely difficult to work with, and you would be starting from scratch implementing some kind of visual pathfinding helical decoder to painstakingly unravel the linear coil of data the scan just sort of blatted into two dimensions.

It's a cool idea. But it's comically, exponentially harder than just using the equipment as intended to just read the laser returns off the disk directly, into a far, far more easily dealt with format.

I'm adding that CD scan to my list of things I'd like to do if I ever get really rich.