Taking control of your collection

From: Carlini, Antonio <Antonio.Carlini_at_riverstonenet.com>
Date: Tue Feb 5 19:33:28 2002

> Jerome Fine wrote:
>
>Is there any way to check a CD?

        The obvious way is to duplicate it to
        an "image copy" on HD. If the copying
        app manages to read all the sectors,
        then it must be OK. For simple ISO9660
        CDs, simply copying off the data may be
        enough.

        There are also programs (such as CDcheck,
        http://www.elpros.si/CDCheck/) which will
        test out your CDs for you.

> Also, how often do you recommend making
> a new copy?

        Once, just before the old one goes bad :-)

        Seriously, I've not actively gone back through
        my stuff to check, but I have dragged stuff off CD
        a few years after burning and so far I've only
        hit one bad CD. And even that one may have been
        burned badly - these days I do a check against
        the source when writing a CD. It was that bad CD
        that made me start doing that!

        For *important* stuff, consider
        making two copies.

        OTOH, five years from now you will be
        moving your CD-R (and CD) stuff
        over to whatever the next high capacity
        media happens to be (C3D,
        http://www.c-3d.net/tech_frameset.html,
        with 125*G*B per recordable disk,
        looks to be adequate ...)

> Also, can CD software duplicate (make an exact copy of a) CDs?

        CDRWin http://www.goldenhawk.com/ and
        CloneCD http://www.elby.org/ can both do this
        and both have free demo versions. There
        are plenty of others (I just don't
        remember which have freebie versions).
        If your CDs have some for of copy
        protection, then things may not be so
        straightforward.

>And can anyone suggest a way to do the
>following on a W98 (Yeck) system:
>
>I want to set up some files in both ISO file structure
>(available under DOS/W95/W98)
>and under RT-11 as an RT-11 partition.
>Is there a way to copy the files to a specific
>block on the CD?

        Tim Shoppa's RT-11 CD is set up this way (IIRC).
        I don't know how he did it, but it's clearly possible.

        The trick for this kind of stuff is usually to have
        the non-ISO9660 filesystem set up to use the bits
        of the CD not used by the ISO9660 system. For details
        on how to do this for OpenVMS's ODS-2
        see http://www.tmesis.com/cdrom/.
        If you want to have the ISO9660 and ODS-2
        filesystems share (some or all of) the same
        data (i.e. you want maybe 600MB of data
        visible to each fs) then see:
        http://support.tditx.com/~odsiso/index.html.

        Neither of these do exactly what you want,
        but they illustrate the general principle.

        Antonio
Received on Tue Feb 05 2002 - 19:33:28 GMT

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