looking for a "stubborn" cd/dvd/bluray reader...

[gosa]

Hi All,

I have a couple of discs (dvd's & blurays) that are starting to fail on me. I try to copy content to hard drive, but get some read errors on a few files.
The thing with this is that it doesn't always give me read error on the same "place" of the disc - sometimes I can get 50mb's of a file, sometimes I get 200mb', and this tells me that it should still be possible to retrieve these files using a program that maybe lower read speed, tries to read the same file a couple of times etc. etc.

Is there such a program that anyone can recommend?

Thanks in advance,
/gosa

[Transitman]

Did you ever stop to think that the drive itself is failing?
Yes, CD/DVD/Blu-ray drives do fail, throwing the errors you are posting.
Try to get another drive and then try to pull the info of the disks and see if you still get the errors.

[gosa]

Cheap media with a couple of years of age, a minor scratch or two.

- Sure, I thought about the drive itself. Been playing with computers for the last 15 years and with cd/dvd-writers almost as long so that was part of my "pre-work" before posting here asking for ideas on software...

And that same experience tells me that a lower read speed and a process of reading that does allow for retries is probably one of the more obvious stops before running to the nearest store to get a new 100€+ bluray burner (at least that was the price-range when I bought mine) just because a disc or two are failing.
- But thank you for the suggestion.

So - to turn back to my original question:
- I did actually find an application that could do what I initially asked for - try reading the "failing" sectors more than one time before giving up - K3b.
I downloaded and installed it last night (lot's of KDE dependencies so I'm still kind of looking for something a bit more light) and the only reason why I haven't posted my finding until now is that I left it reading before going to bed and my mornings been kind of filled with diapers and an attention-craving baby.

Anyway - K3b allows for setting the amount of retries and I can set read speed. On the "slightly" negative side I had to read the full 40GB's creating an iso out of the disc, and well - something "lighter" that doesn't need all the extra stuff that K3b pulls down and installs would be nice...

[gosa]

Hmm... got the notion of trying to do my copying through Windows instead, since I remember doing just hat a couple of months ago without any problems, and guess what - the same disc that returned errors in LMDE did in fact let me copy all files without errors when doing it in Windows 7.

There's gotta be some kind of difference in how the disc gets read in Linux compared to Windows, but that feels like it might be an issue for another thread...

Edit - I just got one read error, but since Windows offer "try again" and it worked the second time...