I've been trying to make a copy of a disc that does not play without skipping. I've tried playing it on a variety of players but there is one section that that lasts about a minute or so where the players either play it, skipping badly for a few minutes as this section slowly passes, or they just stop playing at all. I think the error may be due to pinhole problems. There is a collection of about 5 or 6 pinholes on a small area (about 1 square centimetre) of the disc at about the right distance from the centre of the disc. I decided that the only solution would be to see if I could rip the data in the hope that, with the advantage of not trying to read the disc in real-time, the data might be extracted error-free. I tried EAC with error correction on but it just hung at the bad section of the disc! I then tried NERO having had some success with it on bad discs before. I started off at 1X with no success - it came up with the error message saying that "errors have occured" etc... Then I tried NERO at increasing speeds - 2X, 4X etc... I found that at 8X and above it could successfully read the disc and write the data to a .wav file which plays fine! I assume that NERO is somehow filling in the gaps in the data, maybe interpolating to fill in for the missing data. Does anyone know why this happens only at the faster read speeds? Also, does anyone know of a better method for reading bad discs which tells you about the errors encountered and what was done to fix them? I usually use EAC for this but as I said earlier, it hangs on this disc (I've encountered this before with EAC on a particularly scratched library disc from the "Nuggets" set).
I had this problem before. I'd say, find a player that will play it, then use it to copy the CD track into the computer through the soundcard. If you have a good card your quality loss will be very minimal.
Malc, As long as you got Nero to make the .wav and you don't notice any anomolies don't worry about it. I'll bet there are still errors there, you just don't hear them. But if you don't hear them then who cares? I am wondering if you have EAC set up properly? Did you go through the EAC Options and Drive Options and tweak them? I ripped the MFSL I Robot to my hard drive last night using EAC and EAC transferred it at 24x (took a little over a minute) in Secure mode.
Bad Tracks... I have run into this problem myself when trying to copy a disc image in EAC. I found that if you copy the tracks individually it sometime helps. If it runs across a bad track you can just redo the one bad track changing the speeds and adjusting the offset back and forth until, hopefully, you get a good rip. Hope this helps.
