I've thrown the mag out now, but he had a batch that had in fact deteriorated, visibly IIRC. I know you don't believe anything anyone else says [good up to a point], but sometimes, other people are actually correct.
Whatever the product, there are sometimes lemons that get through the quality control checks. Generally one might expect that the cheaper the product, the poorer the QC, but obviously that's not always the case.
There are also scams. I can imagine that in some disc factory in China, operating on a very narrow profit margin, a batch of CDs or DVDs produced with the wrong mix of chemical dyes, or with out-of-adjustment machinery, is officially consigned for destruction, but due to corruption at the work place the faulty consignment is sold to some shady dealer at a very low price who passes the discs on to another dealer who sells them to unsuspecting Americans or Englishmen on the internet.
Such is life! I think there's less risk of this happening if one buys from a reputable dealer.
Of course I know that other people are sometimes correct. But I also know they are sometimes incorrect. I also know that there's a very strong trait in human nature to blame others for one's own mistakes, to search for a scapegoat, and this is much easier when the scapegoat is an impersonal organisation.
I doubt you've ever been murdered either, but I gather it's something that sadly happens to other people far too often.
Murders are investigated and there's usually pretty conclusive evidence of the existence of a dead body. An incident of a disc that has chemically deteriorated in just 6 months should be investigated. They are supposed to last about 50 to 100 years, aren't they?
Assuming you still have the old drive, it still fits in your computer and it also is still functional, that's still not a good way to archive stuff, relying on old irreplacable, possibly incompatible kit.
I think you missed my point. The solution at the time, 12 years ago, was to revert to using the previous CD drive that I'd had upgraded. The shop recognised that they'd bought a batch of substandard CD drives that had difficulty with the Photo-CD format and reinstalled my old drive free of charge. That was my first computer.
Maybe it works in that drive as that is the drive that incorrectly wrote the discs in the first place, as that's another possible reason for the read failure. The whole point of CDs, DVDs etc is they are usable by anyone with a CD/DVD reader. If that is not true they the archive has failed to be archival on quite a fundamental level.
That's true and they
are usable by anyone with a CD/DVD reader, except on those occasions when things go wrong. Incompatibility issues are rife in the computer world. You know that .
