Testing Media Question.

[Jbird]

I bought some of the Verbatim Vinyl disc's that are on special @ BB this week. I've never done any tests on media I buy, but I read a few bad things about these discs so I decided to test one.

I burned 700 megs to one and loaded up cdspeed but when I select the option to do the C2 error test, after it does the scan up, it tells me unable to perform test.

if I try and look at the media info, with any brand I have, to see who made the disc. I get no information at all.

I'm running the Nforce2 chipset and my burner is an MSI 52x32x52, sorry I don't have the model # handy, but I believe this is the only 32x RW drive they make.

I have tried various things to be able to do C2 tests and media info with zero luck. What am I doing wrong?

(running Windows XP Pro by the way...)

[dodecahedron]

the C2 testing option in CD Speed is limited to only a very few drives. most drives can't do this test.
Lite-On drives, and the Plextor Premium do this test. i'm not sure there are any other drives that do.

as for the Disc Info not working, do you have by any chance CloneCD or Alcohol 120% installed? these programs have a "Hide CDR info" option (or something similarly named) that prevents softwar from being able to read the CDR info (this has do to with bypassin certain copy protection schemes). if you have these programs (or maybe some other) make sure no such option is enabled.

Nvidia IDE drivers are know to be problematic w.r.t. optical drives.
i recommend you switch back to the MS drivers (built into WinXP) and see how things work for you.

[Jbird]

the C2 testing option in CD Speed is limited to only a very few drives. most drives can't do this test.
Lite-On drives, and the Plextor Premium do this test. i'm not sure there are any other drives that do.

as for the Disc Info not working, do you have by any chance CloneCD or Alcohol 120% installed? these programs have a "Hide CDR info" option (or something similarly named) that prevents softwar from being able to read the CDR info (this has do to with bypassin certain copy protection schemes). if you have these programs (or maybe some other) make sure no such option is enabled.

Nvidia IDE drivers are know to be problematic w.r.t. optical drives.
i recommend you switch back to the MS drivers (built into WinXP) and see how things work for you.

thanks for telling me I won't mess with trying to get C2 check to work. As for Nvidia IDE drivers, I know they are crappy, Alc120% won't even work with them installed. But they boost my system performance A LOT and Nero seems to work with the SW IDE drivers installed. I will look in Alc120% for the hide media thing I would have never thought to check there thanks!

[dodecahedron]

welcome

mind telling me what are the Nvidia SW IDE drivers ?
are there 2 kinds of Nvidia IDE drivers ?

[rdgrimes]

The Verbatim Vinyl are metal-Azo media with a speed limit of 16x in SmartBurn. They used to be the older, and much better, "Azo-Blue" or "Super-Azo" type media, but Mitsubishi got cheap on us. The earlier ones were 32x speed rated. Anyway, they perform fairly well at 16x in my LTR-52327S. No C2 and max C1 of about 50 at the edges.