Why Would A CD Be Unreadable in Linux Or XP, But Work In Win10?

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lxskllr

lxskllr

No Lifer
Nov 30, 2004
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Per the title. I got a cd yesterday with blueprints on it, and couldn't open it in debian. Got an unknown file system error. Tried on a XP machine, and it killed explorer. Had to restart it in taskmanager. For kicks I tried it on the secretary's win10 machine this morning, and it opened fine. Presumably it was created in 10 or 8.x, but it's not exactly unusual technology. How did MS screw it up?
 
IronWing

IronWing

No Lifer
Jul 20, 2001
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Could be that the drive in the secretary's CD drive is more forgiving of write errors than those in the other machines. We have music CDs that won't play on the stereo but the PC and car stereo can read them.
 
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lxskllr

lxskllr

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Nov 30, 2004
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Could be. The guy said the cd was checked at their shop before deliveryand it worked fine. It kinda feels like it was made with a proprietary process that requires that process to work properly. I've never burned a lot of discs, but back in the day, you had to be careful regarding the method so it could be used on a wide variety of soft/hardware. I never did have a firm grasp of the technology cause I didn't use it much.

Optical media sucks, especially with modern file lockers today. I typically use mega for work stuff. I don't deal with anything particularly sensitive, so it works well for me. I'm gonna keep playing with it out of curiosity more than anything. Might happen again, and I'd like to be able to deal with it in debian. Or it might be like you said, and it's just a wonky burn :shrugs:
 
repoman0

repoman0

Diamond Member
Jun 17, 2010
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Error correction in CDs is really interesting. I don't remember the exact numbers but it's designed so that something like 1600 or 1800 out of every 2048 bits need to be read correctly for the block to decode properly .. the rest are redundant. Could have some marginal critical blocks that one drive can read and the others can't. Rip the drive out of the Win 10 machine, plop it in yours temporarily and find out for sure :p
 
Scarpozzi

Scarpozzi

Lifer
Jun 13, 2000
26,391
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Open it in Windows and see how they formatted the disk (file system). Remember it could be FAT(16), FAT32, NTFS, etc...see if they defaulted to something other than NTFS. Additionally, NTFS security sometimes can screw things up when being read by other non M$ systems. It really depends on how the CD was created and with what application.
 
Scarpozzi

Scarpozzi

Lifer
Jun 13, 2000
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It's probably one of those library versioning issues where Windows is ignoring errors that Debian isn't.

See if you can use dd to copy the contents to an output file and open the image to view:

sudo dd if=/dev/sr0 of=cd.img
 
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lxskllr

lxskllr

No Lifer
Nov 30, 2004
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Scarpozzi said:
I was going to suggest "UPGRADING" Debian.
Click to expand...
Not a chance. My life's much better without windows. My machine came with win10. It never ran in that configuration under my ownership. First thing I did was put my old drive in to see if everything worked, then copied it over to the ssd the machine came with.
 
Scarpozzi

Scarpozzi

Lifer
Jun 13, 2000
26,391
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lxskllr said:
Not a chance. My life's much better without windows. My machine came with win10. It never ran in that configuration under my ownership. First thing I did was put my old drive in to see if everything worked, then copied it over to the ssd the machine came with.
Click to expand...
I know how you are. I was just kidding. =P

Working with Novell and Windows Server for so many years, it was just easier to conform and run a Windows administrative workstation for everything. It was only when I flipped and was working more with Red Hat/Cent OS Enterprise systems that I ran Linux workstation and used Virtual Box to give me native Outlook/Microsoft Office.
 
lxskllr

lxskllr

No Lifer
Nov 30, 2004
59,384
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That's one thing I don't have to deal with. This is a very small company, and the infrastructure is all ad hoc. There's no "company technology" I have to really work around. I standardized the docs on .odt. The server is windows, but if I had set it up, it would have been linux, and would have served the same purpose. No Exchange, or anything like that.
 
lxskllr

lxskllr

No Lifer
Nov 30, 2004
59,384
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Kaido said:
Maybe it's set to "use like a USB flash drive?"

View attachment 28010
Click to expand...
I bet that's how it was created. It even had the date as title formatted like that. When I go in Monday, I'll see if I can write to it from the secretary's machine. That should tell me what method they used. Your pic says it works on XP though, and my disc failed on XP. It may just be a bad burn. Back in the day, I used to burn at 4x, or half the drive's speed. Whatever... I just scaled it back working on the assumption that slower=more reliable. Of course, that was a different time. Everything computing was a little worse and unreliable.
 
Scarpozzi

Scarpozzi

Lifer
Jun 13, 2000
26,391
1,780
126
lxskllr said:
I bet that's how it was created. It even had the date as title formatted like that. When I go in Monday, I'll see if I can write to it from the secretary's machine. That should tell me what method they used. Your pic says it works on XP though, and my disc failed on XP. It may just be a bad burn. Back in the day, I used to burn at 4x, or half the drive's speed. Whatever... I just scaled it back working on the assumption that slower=more reliable. Of course, that was a different time. Everything computing was a little worse and unreliable.
Click to expand...
I was thinking more that it was burned using specialized burner software. I forgot that windows built the capability to write a disk in because it's been so long since I've used a CD/DVD for anything. Part of the problem is that all the vendors have switched to downloadable ISOs and no one ships software anymore. Doing systems administration, I always mounted ISOs instead of burning anything....even on the Lights Out Controllers/DRACs.
 
VirtualLarry

VirtualLarry

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Aug 25, 2001
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Win10 UDF multi-session mastering? Some systems (drives) cannot read discs, until they are "CLOSED" in the burner that was used to write them. IF they didn't properly "CLOSE" the disc (or even track), that might be why the XP rig has issues. Does it have a CD-RW drive, or just a CD-ROM?
 
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lxskllr

lxskllr

No Lifer
Nov 30, 2004
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I'm not sure, but I think it's RW. I know for sure my debian box has RW.
 
P

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
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IronWing said:
Could be that the drive in the secretary's CD drive is more forgiving of write errors than those in the other machines. We have music CDs that won't play on the stereo but the PC and car stereo can read them.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it could be its a difference in the hardware of the drive rather than the OS being the issue. Many times found differences in what different drives will tolerate.
 
BarkingGhostar

BarkingGhostar

Diamond Member
Nov 20, 2009
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This is all academic, right? I mean, you opened it in Win10 so you can copy it to that machine and then move it another way. This is just puzzle looking to be be solved and not something truly holding you up, right?
 
lxskllr

lxskllr

No Lifer
Nov 30, 2004
59,384
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Just curious what the problem is. Already have control entered, road alignment, bridge footers, and piles computed. Waiting to get my truck back from the shop cause my little triangles are in there, and I like them better for scaling on half prints.
 
Steltek

Steltek

Diamond Member
Mar 29, 2001
3,309
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VirtualLarry said:
Win10 UDF multi-session mastering? Some systems (drives) cannot read discs, until they are "CLOSED" in the burner that was used to write them. IF they didn't properly "CLOSE" the disc (or even track), that might be why the XP rig has issues. Does it have a CD-RW drive, or just a CD-ROM?
Click to expand...

I remember running into this a lot back in the day.

Also, I also dimly recall that XP (at least at one service pack level, anyway, don't remember which) had problems reading UDF discs.
 
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