Opticals, Generations of control fail

[Lorne]

I pulled a total brain fart when it came to making a title of this problem (rant?).

Since the days of the continuous climb of CD optical speeds of 1x and up there has been problems arising and fixes in hardware and firmware that resolve that followed.
(Remember those day playing a game and even on the network when all sudden everything stopped just for the system to have to access that one minute data bit that was on the CD and it had to spin up to retrieve it, And the problem only got worst as drive X-speeds increased)
This problem disappeared long time back from several improvements.

But there is still one problem that exist to this very day that has not been resolved.
Its the CRE (Cycle redundancy Error) and No bit destonation error (Or what ever its really called)).

I work at and image and printing lab and receive several CD, DVD and BR disk daily and have to copy them over to the server.
Now I have used many computers and optical drives from really cheap to high price and name brand has never made any difference in this problem over time.

We receive a bad disk, It could have been quality or bad burn of some kind but during the copy the optical drive goes into blinking mode and the progess bar (Both GUI and command line copying) just sits there.
It will sit there till the next power outage if you let it (On a extremely rare occasion it retunes a "Cant copy file" with the 3 options of "Try again" (waste of time) "Skip" (also a waste of time since the following file is fubar as well) and "Cancel".
If you hit cancel it will sit there again trying to cancel the copy till the power goes out or you hit the eject button which also resets the optical drive error.
And try again or search out what files are messed up (possibly going through this several times till you find where the good ones resume)
Nothing like coming back an hr later and finding a DVD or BR stuck on the 10th file out of a thousand.

I remember this crap happening through DOS, 3.1, NT, 95, 98 &ME, 2K, XP and 7. (Not tried what is not listed).

Why hasn't this been fixed yet?

 

[KingFatty]

Are you using plain old windows to perform the file copies?

Maybe there is a more sophisticated program that can copy the data in a more robust way, to where when a disc error is encountered, the program can move the disc along and copy the rest and just mark that one part of the copied data as questionable?

Sorry nothing specific comes to mind, but I'm thinking something like TeraCopy for CDs? It's great for generally copying files, but maybe there is an equivalent like TeraCopy made especially for optical discs?

 

[Elixer]

When CD/DVD or really anything actually have issues, the best thing to do is boot up linux and use dd or ddrescue or one of the other utils of that type, and let it run.
It usually can pull most, if not all the data available.

As for 'fixing it' in the first place, the tech is pretty old, and it would cost millions if not billions to make the necessary improvements, and nobody is willing to sink in that kind of cash into something that most people will never use these days.

 

[Phynaz]

There's not anything to fix, the drives are performing as designed and attempting to recover data. If you don't want them to do this there's many utilities out there that allow you to turn off read retries.

 

[Auric]

CDCheck and Unstoppable Copier are older examples of suitable third-party proggies.

 

[hal2kilo]

CDCheck and Unstoppable Copier are older examples of suitable third-party proggies.

I've always thought that CD and DVD tecchnology was somebodies bad joke of a kludge and it only got worse over time as they made them cheaper and cheaper.

Don't even get me started on Sony MO drives that were obsoleted in 2008, yet were still using the junk refurbed by a third party.

 

[Cerb]

I pulled a total brain fart when it came to making a title of this problem (rant?).

Since the days of the continuous climb of CD optical speeds of 1x and up there has been problems arising and fixes in hardware and firmware that resolve that followed.
(Remember those day playing a game and even on the network when all sudden everything stopped just for the system to have to access that one minute data bit that was on the CD and it had to spin up to retrieve it, And the problem only got worst as drive X-speeds increased)
This problem disappeared long time back from several improvements.

Like programs that made virtual discs 🙂.

But there is still one problem that exist to this very day that has not been resolved.
Its the CRE (Cycle redundancy Error) and No bit destonation error (Or what ever its really called)).

I work at and image and printing lab and receive several CD, DVD and BR disk daily and have to copy them over to the server.
Now I have used many computers and optical drives from really cheap to high price and name brand has never made any difference in this problem over time.

Data on DVD+R, factory DVDs, and BD-Rs is very well protected, and DVD-R still far better than CD. Some controllers and drives were better than others with really bad discs maybe up to 8 years ago, but once enough was integrated for the drives get disposable-cheap like they are, today, that disappeared. Today, audio CD reading quality, which is almost entirely a consequence of chipset choice, is all that still varies much, TMK.

Nothing like coming back an hr later and finding a DVD or BR stuck on the 10th file out of a thousand.

I remember this crap happening through DOS, 3.1, NT, 95, 98 &ME, 2K, XP and 7. (Not tried what is not listed).

Why hasn't this been fixed yet?

Doesn't matter to most users, being a rare occurrence for most of them. Even being on the 10th file, they could have made it not turn the PC unresponsive, by now, you'd think. That's what really gets me about it. Trying as hard as possible to copy the data is fine.

 

[Lorne]

Yeah lately I look at the burned disk and can visually tell its going to cause problems now and set those aside till after most copying to give them my full attention.

Linux is not an option sadly.
3rd party programs still do the same thing, YOu have to use taskmanager to force them closed or manually eject the disk to break the cycle redundancy and try again.

Yet HDD find and break this fault right away (but is more devastating of course.)