After having watched "Dissecting the CD Player: How to Turn Shiny Plastic into Music" by Technology Connections https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yJqlD9RxD4 I went on a CDROM research binge. Found this on my way https://debugmo.de/2007/07/read-your-dvds-the-raw-way/ Its about DVDs (has data dump plus code), but you can use same mechanism to easily modify CDROM drive using $4 piece of hardware (ebay "EZ-USB fx2lp cy7c68013a board").