I'll add just one observation to Sara's great tips:
Just in case you are considering the purchase a CD or DVD burner, it has
been my experience that Plextor drives are very high quality and are the
drives most likely to work with linux.
Sara Kunz wrote:
>
> I read with interest the recent message about reading older CDs because
> I have CDs stored on spindles, copies of users's backups. Recently I
> have been working on comprehensible instructions for using X-CD-Roast to
> write CDs and DVDs under Linux. I wanted to learn more about
> thedifferent media and how to store the disks. In the process I found
> these websites:
>
> http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15800263
>
> http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq.html
>
> http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html
>
> From the Information Week article:
>
> " I did discover bad CDs, but not one--zero--was traceable to a specific
> brand or dye type. Instead, for me, the only disks that failed were
> those that I had covered with a glue-on paper label from a
> print-it-yourself CD label-maker kit. Several of these labeled CDs were,
> in fact, totally unreadable by every means I tried (including special
> data-recovery software); all the data on those CDs is just plain gone.
> My best guess is the glue on these do-it-yourself labels interacted with
> either the foil or the dye, rendering the CDs useless."
>
> You need to read the article all the way through to get to an item which
> one of my colleagues made special note of - be good to the TOP of the
> media. It is not enough to use a water based marking pen. You should
> also take care not to scratch or mar the top of the media as well as the
> bottom.
> The DVD website is useful if you ever wondered what the difference was
> between DVD-R and DVD+R.
>
> I recently bought some DVD+Rs. They were not a problem on my Dell box
> using Nero or on my personal Linux box with a Sony writer. I found
> that the DVD+Rs were a problem on Linux boxes with new Pioneer CD/DVD
> writers. The media were writable only with growisofs. This is a
> cautionary note because what works on one writer may not work on another.
> Regards,
>
> Sara Kunz
>
--
-Bill-
-------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Gurley, Technical Director |
Department of Chemistry | Consider Linux and
Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville | Open Source Software!
Received on Mon Dec 06 2004 - 19:39:49 MST