Testing Rewritable Media

[Glenn9999]

Since I have a stack of rewritable optical media sitting here that hasn't been touched for a while. So, I was giving some thought on how best to test RW media (CD-RW, DVD-RW, others) to see whether it is good or not. Of course, I don't want to have to find out the hard way by trying to use it and come back with errors. I don't really want to throw these out, and the topic is interesting to me. One thing I do think is that it can be useful to have some form of "Scandisk" that will work in such a situation, but that isn't necessarily feasable on a write-once media (I think they only do it with UDF anyway), so I was thinking of some ideas.

The best idea I had in mind:

1) Generate a file the exact published size of the media. What would be the best contents of the media? Would multiple files be better?

2) Burn those files to the media at the top rated speed of the media.

3) Check the files (compare them either against the originals or MD5 them).

4) Erase the disk.

Of course if any errors come in the process then it is considered to be bad media.

Any other thoughts or better approaches to take?

(I apologize if this isn't the right forum, it seemed the best given the list)

Edited April 19, 2010 by Glenn9999

[Glenn9999]

Okay, I ended up doing this and it worked very well. In fact, I remembered when I went to do it to verify the burn, so that folded in steps #2 and #3.

The only other question I had out of this is about DVD-RW media. The disk I had set aside for general use didn't work, and I had to go 3 disks into the spindle of new disks I had to find a disk that passed the tests. Is/was this typical for 4X rewritable media, or would this might point to something wrong with my burner (since I went to another computer to burn it)?

[dencorso]

It is possible that your burner is having problems. I've had a great Lite-On that, one day, decided it wouldn't burn DL media anymore, after just one year of use. It was able to burn all other kinds of media OK, but always gave errors while burning the second layer. After strugling with it for about a week, I gave up, bought another one (an LG, this time), and have been using it for more than 3 years without problem. It does happen! And I do have another identical Lite-On (bought in the same day and place and belonging to the same production batch) in another box that is working OK up to now...