Strange CDROM experience

[L. Rugolo]

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