what would cause a burned data CD-R to work in some PCs but not others?
August 10th, 2008 | 
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ultra_balexbot asked:
i work at a CD/DVD duplication company. recently i had a client who ordered 500 CD-rs with a bunch of PDFs on them. after running the job in my duplicator the client complained about 5 of the discs not working. we got them back and tested them in our computers and they worked fine in all but one. i called tech support on the duplicator today and was told by them that they think the duplicator is fine. what other possible issues could be causing this disc error on some machines but not all? i’ve had the same issue come up with DVD-R’s as well, where a DVD job would play in the clients desktop PCs but not their Laptop PCs. i’ve questioned the media stock, the destination drives, all the obvious stuff. there’s obviously something else i’m unaware of.
Laura
i work at a CD/DVD duplication company. recently i had a client who ordered 500 CD-rs with a bunch of PDFs on them. after running the job in my duplicator the client complained about 5 of the discs not working. we got them back and tested them in our computers and they worked fine in all but one. i called tech support on the duplicator today and was told by them that they think the duplicator is fine. what other possible issues could be causing this disc error on some machines but not all? i’ve had the same issue come up with DVD-R’s as well, where a DVD job would play in the clients desktop PCs but not their Laptop PCs. i’ve questioned the media stock, the destination drives, all the obvious stuff. there’s obviously something else i’m unaware of.
Laura
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CD/DVD drives read media by shining a laser on the media and reading the reflections. Most consumer drives have lasers generated by LED’s. Over time, LED’s fade in brightness, and there can be some minor frequency shifting as well. Older drives will have a harder time reading any media.
Also, some media has a specific colour to help specific drives read the media better, at the expense of other drives. Some CR-R/RW media I’ve seen defects in had a blue or green cast. Silver or gold CD-R media tends to be more compatible, but that still depends on the drive being used.
Environmental conditions can also cause media to cause erratic reflections, such as higher than average heat which can flex the media, or media that is significantly colder and attracts condensation. And the plastic in the media may also haze for various reasons, particularly as the plastic gets older.
Reading such media depends on the signal strength of the reflections. If the drive gets a weak signal, it might retry a few times before giving up. Just because you have media that works in some drives doesn’t mean it’s okay; your drives might be retrying significantly but still managing to get a clean read, whereas other drives are not able to do so.
I’d suspect the media itself. As for why it’s bad, you may not ever know unless you can review/compare different media thoroughly under a microscope.