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-   -   How concerned should I be about these Nero CD-Speed C2 errors? (http://www.hardwarebanter.com/showthread.php?t=24049)

Robert Hancock August 13th 03 04:08 AM

How concerned should I be about these Nero CD-Speed C2 errors?
 
Many drives, especially DVD and CD-ROM (read-only) drives, have fairly poor
C2 error reporting accuracy. Especially since CDSpeed says that the drive
seems unable to report damaged sectors, I would take the damaged sector
indications from that drive with quite a grain of salt.

C2 errors are not simply a function of the disc either, they're also a
function of the reading drive, and many DVD drives don't really read CD-R
discs all that well..

--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
To email, remove "nospam" from
Home Page:
http://www.roberthancock.com/


"R. Paul Martin" wrote in message
...
I've just gotten Nero 6 and I've run CD-DVD Speed 2.01 on some CD-Rs I
had handy. I figured that I'd get results which showed that my CD-Rs
were perfect. Was I ever unpleasantly surprised!

I know what C2 errors are, from having been on this news group for
years and from a Google search last night. I know that the disks can
still be read - for now. But I am concerned. I have stuff archived
on these things and I'd sort of counted on the disks remaining good
for at least 10 years or so.

All of the media I use are either TY or Kodak. The latter is what was
recommended by the burner manufacturer. I don't have all that many
Kodaks left, but I do have hundreds of them which have been burned.
I'm archiving a lot of stuff and now I'm wondering what to do.

My burner is a SONY CRX140E firmware revision 1.0n. It apparently
won't read the C2 errors, as when I run Nero CD-DVD Speed 2.01 on a
burned CD-R in that drive nothing ever happens after I press "start."

I also have a CD-DVD ROM drive, it's a _NEC DV-5700A firmware revision
1.91. This is the drive that will perform the "CD Quality Test."

A couple of randomly selected, because they were close to hand at the
time, CD-Rs yielded lots of C2 errors. Most were between 72 and 240.
But a couple had much higher numbers of C2 errors, one was over 2,000
and the other was over 3,000. One 80 minute Fuji branded TY did score
zero C2 errors. Again, these are all high quality CD-Rs.

I do a comparison test of every CD-R right after I burn it. I use two
different pieces of software for this and in the very rare case of a
discrepancy I ditch the failed disk and re-burn. I also have a 32 bit
crc file and an MD5 file on the disks and those all tested out fine on
the disks that apparently have all of these C2 errors.

I'm presenting information below on two disks that I tested. One is a
Kodak CD-R and the other is a pressed audio CD. If anyone has any
information about how maybe these results do not mean that I have a
disaster on my hands I'd be glad to hear it. But if I do have a
disaster I'd like to hear suggestions.

Test results for CD-R:

Disk label: Archive_316
Type: 74 minute CD-R
Manufacturer: Kodak
Serial number: 9355 3111 2286
Software used to burn: EZCD 3.5c

CD Quality test:
1st try: 1,848 C2 errors
2nd try: 1,816 C2 errors

I also did a Nero scan disk test, and even though the software warned
that the NEC CD-DVD ROM drive "is unable to report damaged sectors" of
the CD-R I got the following results.

Nero Scan Disk test:
Starting surface scan
Good: 92.45 %
Damaged: 7.55 %
Unreadable: 0.00 %
Surface scan completed

Running all the other tests I got the following.

Drive: _NEC DV-5700A
Firmwa 1.91
Transfer Rate - Average: 19.57x
Transfer Rate - Start: 11.70x
Transfer Rate - End: 25.92x
Random Seek Time: 85 ms
1/3 Seek Time: 92 ms
Full Seek Time: 140 ms
1 X CPU Usage: 4 %
2 X CPU Usage: 8 %
4 X CPU Usage: 11 %
8 X CPU Usage: 16 %
Burst rate: 927 KB/sec
Spin Up Time: 3.08 sec
Spin Down Time: 2.55 sec
Load Time: 0.83 sec
Eject Time: 1.21 sec
Recognition Time: 10.63 sec

It also said that DAE Quality was 10 and "accurate stream" was
checked.

Test results for pressed audio CD:

Disk label: Rubber Soul - The Beatles
Type: pressed CD
Manufacturer: EMI Records Ltd.

CD Quality test:
1st try: 240
2nd try: 336
3rd try: 144

Nero Scan Disk test:
Starting surface scan
Good: 98.37 %
Damaged: 1.63 %
Unreadable: 0.00 %
Surface scan completed

Running all the other tests I got the following.

Drive: _NEC DV-5700A
Firmwa 1.91
Transfer Rate - Average: 14.04x
Transfer Rate - Start: 9.36x
Transfer Rate - End: 17.52x
Random Seek Time: 122 ms
1/3 Seek Time: 118 ms
Full Seek Time: 150 ms
1 X CPU Usage: 11 %
2 X CPU Usage: 27 %
4 X CPU Usage: 27 %
8 X CPU Usage: 47 %
Burst rate: 851 KB/sec
Spin Up Time: 3.17 sec
Spin Down Time: 2.59 sec
Load Time: 0.84 sec
Eject Time: 1.21 sec
Recognition Time: 9.18 sec

In looking through this news group and through Google I've seen some
folks saying that a single C2 error is good reason to ditch the disk!
I couldn't afford to do that.

Any advice would be appreciated.




James Perrett August 13th 03 02:51 PM

"R. Paul Martin" wrote:

I've just gotten Nero 6 and I've run CD-DVD Speed 2.01 on some CD-Rs I
had handy. I figured that I'd get results which showed that my CD-Rs
were perfect. Was I ever unpleasantly surprised!


I've had CDSpeed behave strangely on some computers. It will show many
non existent C2 errors which are not shown when running Plextools' CD
Test function on the same drive.

Although C2 errors are correctable I would not expect to see any of them
on a properly burnt disc.

Cheers.

James.

R. Paul Martin August 14th 03 11:32 AM

On Wed, 13 Aug 2003 03:08:38 GMT, "Robert Hancock"
wrote:

Many drives, especially DVD and CD-ROM (read-only) drives, have fairly poor
C2 error reporting accuracy. Especially since CDSpeed says that the drive
seems unable to report damaged sectors, I would take the damaged sector
indications from that drive with quite a grain of salt.

C2 errors are not simply a function of the disc either, they're also a
function of the reading drive, and many DVD drives don't really read CD-R
discs all that well..


Okay, so maybe I don't have to get all worried after all. I'm going
to see if I can find anyone with another drive and Nero CDSpeed and
see if I get these errors on that drive. Thanks.

R. Paul Martin August 14th 03 05:39 PM

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 21:23:40 -0700, Mike Richter
wrote:

....
Before getting upset, I'd check a few on a drive you know to be good -
or at least on another drive. If that's in general agreement with your
first results, then I'd check to see what material is so important you
want a further backup and make that.


Thanks, Mike. I'm going to try to find someone I can check it with.

i'd really like to hear from anyone who's in my same boat: lots of C2
errors where there really shouldn't be any.

The trick is to find out what media write well in your drive at what
speed *before* you use them for archiving.


Yeah, I'd thought I'd done all of this, but I've never had a real CD
checker before. I triple check every burn at the file level, but
nothing I have has been able to really check the burned CD-R itself;
actually, it looks like I still don't have software which will do this
correctly.

David Cohen August 18th 03 12:53 AM

I downloaded cdspeed some time in the past. As I recall it told be
just about everything I ever tried had errors, usually giving up
before completion. I gave up on cdspeed and have been living happily
since and forever after.
Dave Cohen

mcheu wrote in message . ..
On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 18:55:19 GMT, R. Paul Martin
wrote::

I've just gotten Nero 6 and I've run CD-DVD Speed 2.01 on some CD-Rs I
had handy. I figured that I'd get results which showed that my CD-Rs
were perfect. Was I ever unpleasantly surprised!

I know what C2 errors are, from having been on this news group for
years and from a Google search last night. I know that the disks can
still be read - for now. But I am concerned. I have stuff archived
on these things and I'd sort of counted on the disks remaining good
for at least 10 years or so.

All of the media I use are either TY or Kodak. The latter is what was
recommended by the burner manufacturer. I don't have all that many
Kodaks left, but I do have hundreds of them which have been burned.
I'm archiving a lot of stuff and now I'm wondering what to do.


C2 errors can be reported by the reading drive for any number of wacky
reasons. All it means is that it encountered a problem on its first
try. This can be caused by any number of innocuous causes, including
a dirty drive lense, a smudge on the disc, a dirty environment, etc.
I wouldn't say it's something to worry about unless the errors are
reproduceable in multiple tests and in testing on at least one other
drive.

At any rate, if the data you're archiving is really important, it
wouldn't hurt to make a second backup and store them separately.
----------------------------------------
Thanks,

MCheu


R. Paul Martin August 19th 03 12:34 AM

On 17 Aug 2003 16:53:09 -0700, (David Cohen) wrote:

I downloaded cdspeed some time in the past. As I recall it told be
just about everything I ever tried had errors, usually giving up
before completion. I gave up on cdspeed and have been living happily
since and forever after.


Yeah, I may have to adopt that policy. I had been looking forward to
having that utility being of some use to me. Such is life.


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