CD-Rom/DVD Combo Question

[Guest]

I've noticed that alot of different CD-Rom's/burners etc. have problems reading burned CD's I'm looking for a DVD/CD-Rom drive that minimizes these problems. Basically - the drive that can read ANY burned CD with little or no problems.

 

[Arrow]

There is no ABSOLUTE guarantee, but the Pioneer 16x is pretty good.

Rob
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[ejsmith2]

There's a lot of different situations with drives. Some burners don't read bad sectors very well (plextors), but do outstanding on other copy protections. Some readers (kenwood 52x) don't like the minimum reflectivity of cdrw. Basically, if you use a cdrom writer, there's no cd you can't 'read'. The laser can put out the extra power, and the receiver can bump up the gain control. But they all have really slow seek times compared to a reader.

If you're planning on using REALLY cheap disks ($.15/cdr, HKs), then there's a good chance that any cd reader will have problems. But the numbers I've seen for the Pioneers are good.

 

[dmcmahon]

Why do the combo drives have bad seek time? Reason for asking: I recently "upgraded" my CD-RW drive with a combo drive that included DVD. DVD playback is nice, and as a burner it seems to work well. But: when playing games, especially Diablo II, it has an incredibly annoying lag whenever I change maps, and occasionally it seems to get stuck seeking for something. Also, can you explain the remark about the bad sectors and copy protection?

Thanks,

Doug

 

[ejsmith2]

Diablo 2 uses Safedisk 2. There's a good chance your drive is having problems reading 'through' the copy protection.

Basically (as I see it), either msft threatened plextor or signed a deal with them, so their 'firmware' wouldn't let SD2 copied disks work on anything but a plextor drive. So you can make a backup of Diablo2/Red Alert 2, but they will not work in ANY other drive except a plextor. Which is why I still have my sony 4x USB drive......

Anyway, the deal with bad sectors is just that. Some copy protections use bad/weak sectors, and the plextor drives don't want to give up trying to read the sector. It just takes a long time to read disks. You can speed things up by having the software do more work, though.

 

[dmcmahon]

Thanks, that was helpful. Is there any way around this problem? I don't care to make a backup (though it would be nice to run entirely off of the hard drive), so my issue boils down to the run-time performance. If as you say the drive is having trouble reading through the stinking copy protection, I guess I'm screwed. I can still return the drive, but what would I replace it with? I guess what I'm asking is how can I be sure to get a drive that won't have similar problems? (This all sucks, by the way...100% of my software is legal and I hate being saddled with this crap.)

 

[ejsmith2]

I don't know that the copy protection is the problem, for certain. I know diablo2 runs fine with my kenwood 72X, Win2k/98, original and backup. I know I've seen issues on the official FAQ at blizzard about certain (don't remember which) drives having problems with diablo2, and the usual 'update your drivers/firmware; you're sucking really bad if that doesn't fix it' answers. It is possible to 'crack' the game so the protection gets thrown out the door, and you run completely off the hard drive; there's about 4 or 5 different ways of doing this.

Possibly it could be the motherboard not liking the drive. You might, if you have access, plug the drive into another computer and try running diablo2.

 

[dmcmahon]

Can you tell me how to crack the protection? It's annoying and I'd really like to run off the hard drive. I've tried everything, including loading the entire CD image to a virtual CD driver, nothing seems to work. I'm not planning to steal the software (in fact, the game is well worth the $35 price, I don't know why anyone would).