[G4] Strange CDROM experience

[L. Rugolo]

Many thanks to David Crandon and John McGibney for their insights.

--Larry

At 8:10 PM 11/28/02 I posted this to the G4 list:
>
>  I needed to make a copy of an old CDROM which was rather dirty and
>  scratched on each side. I cleaned it as well as I could, but when I
>  tried to burn it (Que!Fire, Titanium Toast 5) on my PowerMac G4
>  (Gigabit Ethernet, MacOS 9.2.2, 20GB HD, 703MB RAM) I got many error
>  messages about "bad" files. The result was that I made two
>  "coasters", the first burned at 1:1, the second at 8:1. So I gave up
>  on trying to burn a copy of the CD and instead just tried to make
>  finder copies of the individual files and folders. Again, many of the
>  files were corrupted and had to be skipped.
>
>  Then I slipped the old CDROM into my wife's slot-loading iMac; much
>  to my surprise I was able to copy all the files to her hard drive
>  with no errors. The two computers are connected via ethernet and
>  through file sharing I transferred the files to my G4. Then I got the
>  idea of creating the CD I wanted by using "data copy" instead of
>  "disk copy", so I dragged the folder of stuff which I had transferred
>  over from the iMac into Toast and burned the CD at 8:1 with
>  absolutely no errors. (The Que!Fire drive is attached to the G4 and I
>  didn't want to go through the bother of attaching it to the iMac.)
>
>  My question:  Why did my G4 find errors on the old CDROM when the
>  iMac found none? Was it the disk or is there a problem with the CD
>  drive on the G4 and if so does it need to be repaired or cleaned? I
>  have never before encountered any problems trying to read or copy any
>  other CDs on the G4. Incidentally, the G4 is about 2.5 years old and
>  the iMac is just about one year old.
>
>  Thanks for listening.
>
>  --Larry