Hi ALL,

I am a little new to the testing of CDRs. So if anyone could tell me using Nero CD Speed, what results are considered very good, good, OK, bad, and very bad. And also, if I can use this CD Doctor program I hear so much about. I am not sure it is compatible with my drive. Well lets start with an example and then someone can give me their opinion. I have a 74MIN 650MB TDK, burned over 2 years ago, and stored in good condition, with no visible marks/discoloration on it. The actuall written length is 71mins, and 627MB, and its a DATA CD. With ATIP: 97m 24s 01f
Manufacturer: Taiyo Yuden Company Ltd. Recording Layer: Cyanine Material.
And I know that Taiyo Yuden is suppose to be among the BEST for quality CDRs.

I decided to pop this into both my CDR/RW dirve, which is a Ricoh 7200A, and my regular 50x MAX CD-ROM, of which I do not know the brand, nero cd speed just says "E-IDE CD-ROM 50X L V15".

First, for my CD-ROM, using CD Quality Check on Nero CD Speed, and it reported, 458,640 Errors (with 3 red spikes through the majority of the disc, and as many a 6 red spikes directly at the end of the disc (maybe because the CDR is not finalized???)). Then with my CD-ROM and Nero CD Speed ScanDisc, running both the filetest and the surface scan. For the File Test, it gave the result, files checked: 21 / Errors: 0. As for the surface scan, I got the result: 98.83% Good, 0% Damaged, and 1.17% Unreadable.
Next, for my CDR/RW drive, using CD Quality Check on Nero CD Speed, and it reported, 0 ERRORS!!! (no spikes). Then with my CDR/RW and Nero CD Speed ScanDisc, running both the filetest and the surface scan. For the File Test, it gave the result, files checked: 21 / Errors: 0. As for the surface scan, I got the result: 100.00% Good, 0% Damaged, and 0% Unreadable.
I am a little confused as to how my burner returned NO ERRORS AT ALL, but my regular CDROM reported 400000+ errors, and the unreadable sectors.

Now after seeing all this, I am guessing since the burner read it perfectly, the CDR is fine, but why the difference between my CDROM and CDR/RW. And does that mean anything for the longevity of my media? Also, assuming I am using my CDR/RW for my tests, what is considered acceptable for my other media? Is less than 100,000 errors good enough? less than 50,000?, or does it have to be 0 errors? And how does the surface scan need to be, generally, ?% Good, ?% Damaged, and ?% Unreadable. I have a lot of important stuff already stored on CDRs, and back then, I did not know much about quality of CDRs, I just picked up what I could find. So therefore, I would like to test my CDRs, and move the data onto different CDRs, if there is a problem with them, before they die out completely. Also, are all of these tests required before you can make a judgement on that CDR, or is it OK if the first test has no errors, can you determine that it is OK? For example, if I run the CD Quality test first, and I get a result of 0 ERRORS, then is there still a need to run the file test and surface scan? And in the same way, what if I ran only the Surface Test first, and it gave me 100% Good, do I still need to run the file test and the CD Quality Test? And should I use my burner or my actual CD-ROM to do these test? Thank You.

SuperG

P.S. Also, please let me know if I can use CD Doctor with my CDR/RW or my CDROM and do either of my drives support C1 Error Checking? Thanks.

If you get a continuous background noise of yellow spikes, then your burner is just better than your CD ROM drive.
If you get just red bursts, it can be a multisession CD. Nero CD Speed doesn't handle multisession properly, it displays the lead out and lead in of each session as eroneous.
Or more simply, your burner doesn't support C2, and therefore never reports any error. You should test it with EAC and a scratched CD (Examine C2 feature).



It depends on the CD ROM drive, it may just be a very bad drive.



It has to be 0 errors.
Surface Scan good must be 100 %
Damaged >0% means "dying"
Unreadable >0% means "too late".



According to CDRLabs or CDRinfo or CDFreaks, I don't remember, the CD quality check is better. It detects errors undetected by the Surface Scan.



You must test further : use a pressed CD in good shape to test your CD ROM drive. It should never return any error, and like I said check that your burner is capable of reporting errors (with EAC, or CD speed, by the way).
If both are fine, use rather your CD ROM drive : it will warn you sooner than the burner about possible problems.



CD Doctor would be the ideal solution (as well as the next Plextools for Plextor drives) because it can also report C1 errors, so that you can see if your CD is crystal perfect, average, or bad before a signle error appears in CD Speed (result of an overload of C1 errors).

The only way to know if CD Doctor can work with your drives is to try : http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=8095

Pio2001,

Thanks for the info. Well, I checked out the link u gave about CD Doctor, and apparently it only works on Sanyo and LiteON drives, so I guess I can't use that. My only other question is about the C2 errors. How can I be for sure that either my Ricoh 7200A CDR/RW or my CD-ROM supports it? The only thing I have to go by is that in Feurio, when I clicked info. for my Ricoh Drive, there was a box that said "Return C2-errors", and it WAS CHECKED, so I guess that means it DOES support C2 Error checking? However, there is no way, even in Feurio to check that for my CD-ROM, so how could I verify that it does or doesn't? I looked around in Nero CD-Speed, but I couldn't find anything anywhere about info on whether or not the drive supports C2 error reporting or not. I am going to go try EAC, if I can find it. Any help would be great. Thanks.

DayWalker (SuperG)

You need a scratched CD anyway, to be sure about the C2 ability of your drive.
Then, If CD SPeed on an audio CD (data CD don't need C2 support to return errors) or EAC, with C2 enabled return errors, the drive necessarily told them via C2. This is the basic test about working/not working.

You can go further with the DAEquality kit, and measure the accuracy of the C2 info returned by your drive.