A true miracle...

My stupid CD burner, which, naturally, because it's at the top of the two of disk drives on my computer, is the most commonly used one, has become incapable of ejecting without first bouncing the disk off the tray, deciding that something was wrong mid-operation, thus closing itself back up again, and then continuing to strugle to close itself around the disk which is not lodged between the tray and the slot as I try to yank the tray open and rescue whatever poor disk has met this fate. Unfortunately, this was only noticed after it had both scratched the paint off a CD, and then gone on to deliver a big dark coloured and deep scratch into my Battlefield 2 CD. (The worst part about that is that it wouldn't have happened if they didn't treat me like a criminal and just let the game run without CD, because there has never been a CD-Requirer that was not patched within weeks... and this one is just as stupid as the ones from 3 years ago).

Anyways, the game still started -- I imagine that it just hunted for a little bit of data written to some secret location on the disk... I doubted that it would ever install again.

Miraculously, after a few tests, it all works. So... has the technology behind CDs suddenly become 100 times better, or am I just very lucky? (Or very stupid in that I managed to fail at doing a proper check for problems... where the heck is Scandisk?! Why does Microsoft remove perfectlly good little apps from their operating system? They did this to Chess, too... and normal Solitaire.)


Oh, and may this be a lesson to everyone else: Half of a CD burner is if it will acutally eject properly without breaking your brand new disk. Make sure it opens steadily, can not be wobbled when it's open, and does not cost $5.




On the topic of Microsoft and stupidity... what's with the DirectX logo? Half of the logos that I see for that thing look like they were done in MS paint by a 4-year-old.

The thing about pressed CDs is that it's not actually the bottom layer where the information is stored (like burnt CDs, obviously)... I'd be more worried about the disc because the paint on top got scratched off... that's where the most damage can be done. But if it works, it works... I'd go with the 'very lucky' answer. =]

BTW ever heard of opening your cd drive with a pin or paper clip or something? That's what the little round hole in the front is for...

yeah the "paperclip" hole is very useful.

On a 'real' CD the data is on a layer in between the plastic, and not directly under the paintjob -- so scratches on the top side of a pressed CD won't do much damage, as opposed to CD-R's where a gap in the coating will mean the data part is physically gone as well.

Sometimes a pressed CD may look similar to a burned CD, but they are pretty different from one another.

(And of course the interesting part is that when most people try to handle CD-R's carefully, they tend to lay them on a table with printed top-side down, even though that really is the most important & easily damaged part of the CD. A bit counter-intuitive perhaps, but good to know.)

Phillips (who invented the CD) makes some cool stuff..
The information on a CD is actually stored in chunks of data (can't remember the size though); call them A, B, C and D...
These chunks are stored "randomly" within another chunk (call it cluster or whatever).. like this;

|B D A C|

The sequence of the data is "restored" when some nifty math and referrence numbers (IIRC).
The CD player reading data sees something like this;

| B D A C | D C B A | etc..etc

Now it decodes that information, so it will shuffle it back in its original order, as I said, with some nifty math, and spits out the data to you...
This decoding can handle "misreads" of data because of this formula, which is why you still can play alot of old CDs which are scratched beyond recognition.. :p

Unfortunately it only works with CDDA discs. PC games, which have intentionally corrupt data as a means of "copy protection" are much more vulnurable to media damage.

Interesting :)

I have opened a drive with a paperclip once, but that's not the problem with this one. Rather, the tray is determined that it is an egg flipper.

Hate when that happens.

'Protected' music CD's are also much less resistent to scratches thanks to these purposefully corrupted CRC blocks... And VideoCD's are more vulnerable by design -- in VideoCD format you can actually store an 800MB MPEG movie on a standard 700MB CD-R, at a cost of greatly reduced error correction capabilities... But since an error in an MPEG stream is not critical, (you may see some small corrupted blocks, but the movie will continuie to play) it's an OK trade-off... you wouldn't want this on a data CD though, where a similar corruption can make your entire data disk useless.

Oh so that hole on the front is for a paperclip!?

* Returns to pants... *

So, open the thing with the screws no the bottom then :P

what the hell is an "egg flipper"? Do you mean spatula?

[edit] OK, found this "frying pan with false bottom that flips your fried eggs or pancakes – with precision engineering."

I have a CD drive like that. It's very similar to Arkwrights cash till in the comedy "Open All Hours" starring Ronnie Barker. You are lucky if it doesn't take your fingers off.