Older Gold Maxell CD-R discs not reading

Hello SparkyJ,

I have heard of this before. CD's & DVD's do seem to degrade / fail after some time. Its not Apple at fault here. Its the disks.

Regards

Ian

SparkyJ wrote:
I have a ton of back up cds dating back to 97 or so. Virtually all of my Maxell CD-R recordable CDs have gone bad, OR simply the new generation of apple DVD drives do not recognize the burn. I have tried mounting (the bad ones) in my old 8600 to "see" if they will mount and they do not. Some of the older Maxells do mount however. Some have limited file corruption. Either the MAXELL disc medium is not holding out over 7 years OR the newer dual DVD drives are blasting the media while reading it and rendering the medium useless.

I would appreciate to hear if anyone else is experiencing this trouble with older CDs, namely, Maxell.

Hi Sparky,

I had a similar problem with a gold Maxell CD-R (650 MB) burned in about 1999 or 2000.

For some reason, certain files became corrupt for no reason whatsoever. No scratches to the disc, constantly in a jewelbox... i.e. treated with care over the years.

I managed to extract maybe one or two of the actual corrupt files in tact with Data Rescue II, but the rest of these unfortunately are now six feet under. (a shame too, I had an irreplaceable .mp3 of two of my close friends singing onstage with Sting back in 1999)

The rest of the disc's contents, strangely, could be copied straight to the Desktop perfectly.

Funny thing was... I do remember the disc/files being fine in my old eMac about five years ago, the last time I had used the disc. Five years later, the same eMac wouldn't read the troublesome files anymore either. Bummer.

Steve