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Are there any practical ways of telling a imperfect CD-R?

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Are there any practical ways of telling a imperfect CD-R?

Postby UALOneKPlus on Tue Jan 21, 2003 4:16 am

I burned a dozen successful CD-R's a few weeks ago with my new Lite-On 48x CD-RW.

I played with CD Speed tonight, and did a "Scandisk surface test" on a few of those CD-R's. To my surprise Scandisk found several damaged and unreadable sectors on many of the CD-R's. If I had never done this test I would never had known, as I seem to be able to read the files okay on the CD-R's.

Which leads me to a question - practically speaking, does it matter if there are a few damaged sectors? When I burn CD-R's I ask Nero 5.5 to verify the CD-R, and it always states the burning is a success. At what point would Nero say the CD-R burning process is a failure? It seems to not care that there are a few damaged sectors, as evidenced by my Scandisk Surface test...

Thanks...
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Postby cfitz on Tue Jan 21, 2003 1:26 pm

That is not so easy a question to answer as we would like. A few damaged sectors isn't the end of the world, since the error correction will take care of them, but I'd rather not see any on my discs. If it is just two or three, you probably don't need to worry too much, but you should keep an eye on things. If it is tens or more, I think you should be concerned. I personally believe that is too many (although I may be being a bit too much of a perfectionist here). Although the error correction can take care of it now, will it still be able to down the road when the disc has aged and degraded a bit or gotten scratched?

As for the unreadable sectors, that is unacceptable because that means data corruption. However, if you only have one unreadable sector per disc and it is always the last sector on the disc, then what you are seeing is probably a "bug" in CD Speed - the last sector of an unfinalized disc will show up as unreadable even though there isn't an actual problem.

Here are some more tools to help you evaluate the quality of your CD-Rs:

http://elpros.si/CDCheck/
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic. ... 5549#45549

And you might care to read through these threads, just to get a feel for how slippery it can be trying to define and measure "errors" on CDs:

http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic. ... 6568#46568
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=8194
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=7616

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