5 years old CD-RW...
By gildor on Thursday, July 1 2010, 14:47 - Permalink
This blog post is a kind of followup of a previous blog post about reading 10 years old CD-R.
Today, I get a new shiny ASRock ION 330 to play with, in itself this PC has nothing particular. As usual, I begin by using System Rescue CD to check bad blocks on the hard drive, before working with it (badblocks -v -s -w -c 4096 /dev/sda
). Once done, I will check the memory (memtest
). This is my standard procedure when receiving a new PC.
But I don't have my System Rescue CD at hand. No problem, I download it and and write it on an old CD-RW, bought 5 years ago but still sealed into his blister. For your information, this is a Memorex CD-RW 700MB 16-24x. I blank it (wodim blank=all
). I write it at speed 16x, because I don't know how to lower the speed. After writing the CD, I re-read it to check everything is fine (readom dev=/dev/cdrw1 f=test.iso
).
Ooops:
$ readom dev=/dev/cdrw1 f=test.iso [...] Errno: 5 (Input/output error), read_g1 scsi sendcmd: no error CDB: 28 00 00 01 3C 00 00 00 40 00 status: 0x2 (CHECK CONDITION) Sense Bytes: 70 00 03 00 00 00 00 0A 00 00 00 00 11 05 00 00 Sense Key: 0x3 Medium Error, Segment 0 Sense Code: 0x11 Qual 0x05 (l-ec uncorrectable error) Fru 0x0 Sense flags: Blk 0 (not valid) cmd finished after 6.614s timeout 40s readom: Input/output error. Cannot read source disk readom: Retrying from sector 80896. ............. readom: Error on sector 80908 corrected after 9 tries. Total of 0 errors. ..............---
OK, I re-blank it (wodim blank=fast
) and rewrite it. The CD seems to be readable this time. But when I try to boot with it my new ASRock, it fails.
Enough is enough, I get an heavy used Verbatim 8cm CD-RW. Just to show you how old he is: the first ISO written on it was "Debian Sarge". And the magic happens: it works on the first try!!!!
You will probably think that I work for Verbatim. This is not true but I must admit that first-price CD-RW/CD-R seems to be very low quality and don't hold data in time. This is probably related to the chemical compounds of the CD. The failing Memorex CD-RW will end up in a trash and I will continue to use my 5 years old Verbatim CD-RW.
Dear reader, in order to find a way not to dump this failing CD-RW, do you know a way to make it to work?
What you should now about the failing CD-RW:
- there are no scratches on the surface
- the CD-RW has never been used before this morning
- I keep it out of the direct sunlight
- it was stored next to the Verbatim CD-RW
Comments
I don't have any solution for your problem but I find very easy nowadays to just use USB sticks for this kind of usage (it's faster, easier, lighter, …) :) (or even boot on the iso image via network)
Mehdi: Indeed, USB/PXE boot works quite well today.