Scratches on recordable DVDs ?

wrote:

On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 00:47:27 GMT, lid
(Scott Alfter) wrote:

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In article ,
SleeperMan wrote:
Depends on which side this scratch is. In your case it's in bottom side
(lucky you!). In top side there's only paint to prevent dye and scratch
can very easily damage dye. Try it on one bad CDR or DVD and you'll see.

That's only the case with CDs. With DVDs, the recording surface is
sandwiched between two thin discs, not applied to the surface of a thicker
disc. Scratches to the label side of a single-sided DVD-R/RW should have
no effect at all on readability/writability, as long as they aren't deep
gouges that go all the way through the top half of the disc.

A Verbatim DVD-R 2x disc recently became almost unreadable just by using
it on some DVD drives. I still wonder if it was the HP remarked Samsung
drive in a HP desktop PC that broke it.

If the drive scratched it that was either a busted drive or abrasive dirt in
the drive and had nothing to do with the brand.

There were 3 big (1cm) scratches
on the bottom side which looked deep enough since the colour there changed
completely.

If they were down to the chemical layer you need to find out what caused
them and fix it--that's something that even a belt-sander takes a while to
do.

I lost over 800MB of files on that disc, fortunately I had the
possibility to copy the other 3GB and
backup them to another disc.
However DVD recordables are less robust to scratches compared to CD-Rs and
as soon as you get a very small serie of scratches the disc becomes
unreadable.

DVDs have a smaller track width, so one should expect them to be more
susceptible to damage. Polish out the scratches and you should be fine.

--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)