dogzilla

I have a lot of photos I have copied to CDROM, starting about 2 years ago. I've now filled my hard drive with photos and need to delete old photos which are on CDROM.

Before I delete photos, I want to make sure the CDROMs are error free. I used to have a free Windows 98 program that would do the scan, but I can't find it any more. Is anyone aware of a free program to do this scan? I searched Google but my search terms are way too generic (cdrtest, cdrscan, cdrom error scan, etc)

I did try writing a simple program for Linux that just read data off teh CDROM until I got an error. One CD was fine, a scan on a second one reported an error about halfway thru and a scan of a third got partway thru before some error occured that resulted in the scan process hanging and non-killable. I suspect kernerl error recovery code got lost somewhere, or an interrupt never came back for a read.

So, I'm not very confident of the reliabilty of my older CDROMs. I also don't consider hard drives as a reliable media to back up files to for an extended period of time.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

R_R_R

Check this out, I think it's what you're looking for.

http://www.handyarchive.com/Utilitie...k-Checker.html

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dogzilla

I downloaded and ran this program on four of my CDs and got errors on three, including one that I burnt a couple days ago on what is supposed to be high quality media (Maxell CD-R pro). The fourth locked up the program and now I can't open the CD drive until I reboot the machine.

I then tried copying all the files from the CD by dragging the folder icons into a temp folder on my hard drive and no errors reported.

So maybe the test is to just copy files. But it does raise the question whether the program is finding real errors and the CD will deteriorate to being unreadable or whether the program is just too sensitive and reporting all errors, not just inrecoverable errors.

Thanks for the link

namnori

Ah, another program to look into.
Well I've been using a program for several years called CD Check, http://www.elpros.si/CDCheck/
you may want to check it out too. It has a pretty robust way of reading cds that attempts to correct errors.

dogzilla

This program works better. I tried my problem CD and the program let me stop the scan after it appearntly hung and didn't lock the CD drive.

Thanks