When Toast verification fails...

der kopf

I burned an MP3 disc through Toast, and, for the first time since I've had this combo drive, verification failed.



What should I conclude out of this? Throw away the disc and start anew? Could it be the data itself that I'm trying to burn? Anything else?



I think if the data on the disc is at most a little corrupted (a second or so, of the 10 hours), it doesn't suffise for me.



Yet... does a failed verification always mean that you are f*cked?

ghost_user_name

The only times I've had verification fail are when the CDs themselves are bad. I can't imagine any reason is would fair because of the type of data. Sometimes you'll just get crappy CDs that fail like this, especially if you get the cheap-o bargain bin brands.



A failed verifiaction can be a very bad thing if you're backing up important data because it means your files are not properly intact. If it's an audio CD, it means the CD will probably just have some skips throughout or certain tracks may wig out.



So, yeah, just throw away the CD and try again.

der kopf

Thank you, Brad. I'll add my ? .02 to the garbage mountains.

nosey

I have had scenarios where I go through three discs, but the fourth one I burn at half the speed and voila, the verification works perfectly.



My burner is a Sony (I think) it was a long time ago that I put it in this old clunker. It is supposed to be 16x, but I find it works best at 8x with toast.



I also learned that one should try not to do anything else while burning... But that is on an onld 35mhz machine.



My suggestion (not half as worthy as Brad the Moderator!) is if you have three failures in a batch of cd's, burn the rest at half speed.

ghost_user_name

Your story is actually familiar to me, nosey. I had a friend back in high school that got one of the early PC CD burners for some outrageous price like $600. He learned to always use the lowest speed because it kept producing bad CDs. The first generations of CD burners like this were infamous for choking at high speed unless they used SCSI (which is what mine was because I'm just smart like that ). Using them at the high speeds on the slower IDE bus and with the slow CPUs would cause them to choke and produce errors from buffer underruns. Burning at lower speeds reduces the strain on system resources and thereby creates more error-free CDs. Of course, newer CD burners don't suffer from this nearly as much because they are on faster PCs, have much larger caches, and utilize the BURN-Proof technologies.



</history lesson>

nosey

At the risk of sounding old and cranky, my first cd burner (back in the days of old) was a QUE USB. At the time I was buying it thinking I would get an ibook, which was at the time a peculiar shade of blue and only had 2 usb ports. The firewires hadn't been introduced yet. Scsi would have meant buying another pci card...



The idea was to take pictures, archive and put them on cd that day, and present the client with a portfolio of shots and shiny new cd. Without having to tote my whole desktop system around. Nowadays it would be incredibly easy...



That particular burner caused no end of grief... eating cd's left and right, refusing to allow easy-cd (you know, where you just plunk the cd in and add files) and other related problems... And don't get me started on trying to use the damn thing with a hub or anything else usb connected to the system... I think it was a 4x and I could get 1x out on a fairly regular basis...



I even had to break out my old ADB keyboard at one point because my USB keyboard was acting up...



Then I bought my current Sony, and it has been great ever since... Well, mostly... I just don't use it with iTunes anymore...



My other went the Family Upgrade route, and seems to be behaving itself.



Cranky? Me? Bah, humbug, if Santa really liked me, he would get me a newer iBook, instead of more coal...

:cool: