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dbminter

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Everything posted by dbminter

  1. Yeah, 10 years ago, CMC made a good CD-R. I had some burned in like 2000 like were still readable this year. However, their DVD media is questionable. I've only experienced Optodisc CMC DVD-R's, but, half the time, they'd fail to finish burning or wouldn't verify afterwards. It was enough, though, to make me swear off of all CMC media. I even copied and reburned all my CMC CD-R's to Taiyo Yuden's because I don't trust them that much. In short words, I wouldn't use them, no.
  2. It says it's the number of CD's/DVD's recorded on that drive. However, my values never change, even after I burned 2 more discs. Unless the disc is not being counted as another new disc each time because it's rewritable. IE it's the same disc just being erased and rewritten. It's apparently based on what kind of drive you have. This drive in question is a LiteOn, so, maybe it's unique to LiteOns?
  3. I burned 2 discs in a row and it still says the same thing. That the Life count is 36 and that the other is 12 on both burns. So, now, I'm confused. I don't know what these values could possibly be.
  4. Just now noticed something when using a drive I don't normally use for burning DVD+RW's to. This line from the log: I 13:40:05 CD/DVD Life Record Count: 36 - CD/DVD Record Count: 12 What exactly is the CD/DVD Life Record Count and the CD/DVD Record Count? Is it something that your drive has to support in order for it to be visible? Is the number of times the disc has been written to or the number of times the drive has written to any media? What's the difference between the two values? Thanks!
  5. Even though I don't get click happy when I run any installer, I do admit to disabling my Internet connection in ZoneAlarm before running installers with OpenCandy wrapped, excuse the pun around them. That way, they can't phone home and install something I don't want by accident on my part. Plus, I always take a differential backup image in Macrium Reflect before I run any installer or updater. In case any kind of install does something like that, or just messes up the system in general.
  6. dbminter

    Ancient junk

    Went through a closet of stuff to free up some storage space and came across some ancient PC tech junk I'd stored away. One of it was even in its original box. It freed some space getting rid of it. The first item, the one in its box, was an HP CD rewriter. The label on it said it was manufactured in May 2001. Its maximum CD-R write rate was 16x. As one would expect from a 2001 PC internal 5.25" drive, it connects by PATA and the old style power supply. I still have a 32 bit PC from 2009 that had 1 PATA connection on the mobo, but, it's already occupied by a much better, newer rewritable DVD drive. The other item was the much more interesting piece of PC tech history. A small footnote that deserves its place in the forgotten realms. The Castlewood Orb drive. The Orb was a 2001 2.2 GB external storage cartridge based HD drive. It connected by external SCSI. However, it was a piece of junk. The failure rate of disks was even higher than IOMega's Jaz 2, and its high rate of failure was why I tried replacing it with the Orb! Plus, if you had your dial-up modem connected, whenever the drive wrote to a disk, after the write operation, the modem would ALWAYS time out and disconnect! Needless to say, I retired this drive and the disks to the closet in a matter of months. I still had 2 dead disks, 1 disk that was labeled so its contents weren't desirable. The other 2 disks weren't labeled, but, since I don't know where I put that SCSI card I had when I got the Jaz drive, and I don't even know if it still works in modern PC's/Windows 7's library of 64 bit drives, I couldn't check the contents. So, I threw those away. The CD drive still has SOME use, albeit probably $10 worth of use. It's like new but PC's no longer support the technology required to operate it. So, I donated it to a local thrift store, the St. Vincent De Paul Store. I also am donating the Orb drive itself, even though it's only got about $10 worth of value, too, plus it probably doesn't work on modern PC's. Plus, the technology was piss poor to begin with. And, without discs, it's relatively worthless. But, without knowing what contents were on the other 2 disks to erase, I couldn't donate the disks with the drive, and so that's why I threw them away. I mean, I'm not getting any use out of the drive and I'm not getting any value for donating it, so, I might as well donate it. Who knows? Maybe someone out there with an old computer with SCSI who has some old Orb disks but not a working drive might find it. Yeah, right.
  7. My experience with the semaphore time out period has expired error is a conflict between your drive and a controller on the motherboard. Unfortunately, this error rarely gets resolved except by actually replacing the controller in the drive or on the motherboard. This problem was fairly regular on USB optical drives and was caused by using certain ATA to USB bridges in the controller in the drive. So, the only solution was to replace the controller in the drive, which meant using a different drive as the controllers were never designed to be updated by software. There might be some solutions where a software driver could be causing the problem and updating the chipset software might work. I don't have much to offer in the way of how to do that, though. So, maybe somebody else can help. Do you get this semaphore time out when you try to burn other types of discs other than games?
  8. AnyDVD can cause problems not just with verifying. I verified that on two different computers with different drives, with AnyDVD enabled and VIDEO_TS jobs were burnt to DVD+RW discs, the Verify would fail. But, only on DVD+RW. And it was a weird failure. It failed right away and any attempts to burn to that burned disc, even with AnyDVD disabled, would also fail right at the start of the Verify. The only solution was to fully Erase the DVD+RW. Then, burning to them was fine again.
  9. I can't answer the first two questions, but, I can answer the last question. You will need to open the Microsoft Registry Editor. Under Computer, expand the tree for HKEY_CURRENT USER. Expand the tree for Software that will appear under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. Find the ImgBurn entry under Software. Right click on ImgBurn and choose Export. Save the file to wherever you wish. To import these saved settings, just double click on the .REG file you just saved and the settings will be imported. Do not import the Registry keys while ImgBurn is opened. Otherwise, the settings may be changed when the software is closed.
  10. The trick is you schedule full images to run while you're asleep. So, when you get up, they're all done. And a Differential in Reflect on my system takes only 12 minutes to run on average. A small time slice price to pay for a botched installation. It would run faster if I had USB 3.0 on my PC as my external HD supports it and I backup to the external HD. Of course, backing up your system depends on various factors. Like what you store on the partition you're imaging. For instance, I moved TEMPDIR to its own partition so ImgBurn's image files won't be stored on C: with Windows and add GB's to the daily image that I don't care if they get backed up or not. Then, there's things like if you're storing your MP3's or video files on the same partition. My system has more partitions that it knows what to do with! Basically, only Windows and installed programs that can't run as standalone apps exist on my C: partition.
  11. Oh, so THAT'S what the NoUPX version of the .EXE is!
  12. Could be worse. Someone I told about the new ImgBurn got an installer for the new version, don't know from where, and when they installed it, it was apparently poisoned with all kinds of real malware, not what most people are calling the "malware" associated with the dynamic installer. He said it installed a "pirate game," not sure what he meant by that, deleted all his settings, passwords and logins, and extensions from Chrome, and installed "ad-ware," without saying what the ad-ware was. I've not been able to get any more information, like where he downloaded the installer from that might have added all this stuff to it, as he disappeared from IRC after telling me all this happened when he installed it. One of the reasons why I image my Windows partition every day and run a Differential backup before installing any software. You never know what might happen to Windows.
  13. What I'm surprised at is it's an Imation disc that doesn't use CMC Magenetics! I'd have normally blamed CMC, as every Imation disc I've come across has been a CMC, CD's and DVD's. Your drive most likely doesn't like those Ritek DVD+R DL's. I've used some Ritek DVD+R DL's that were branded from TDK without problem. But, not all Ritek is the same. As was directed in the previous reply, Verbatim is the recommended DVD+R DL choice.
  14. Came across some Memorex floppies I had, so, naturally knowing Memorex's low quality trend, since they outsource to CMC, I decided to copy them to better media. However, they were unreadable and unformattable! So, Memorex and Imation made lousy floppy disks, in addition to their lousy CD's and DVD's.
  15. My personal experience with overburning has been it doesn't appear to work very often. My 1 and only success was an audio CD that was like 1 minute longer than the maximum time length.
  16. dbminter

    CMC CD-R's

    I went through my audio CD collection to see what the MID's were on my CD-R's and copy any non-conformists like CMC or Unknown Verbatims and make new copies of them to more reliable Taiyo Yuden CD-R's. I rag on CMC, but, the CD-R's I'm finding so far are about 10 years old (They're max 12x and 16x.) and they're reading to image files. Albeit, some are reading with slowed down read speeds towards the end. I still don't trust CMC, since they made terrible DVD-R's for Optodisk that wouldn't Verify completely. However, I must admit, I'm surprised these CMC's are still readable. The Verbatim CD-R's are those 45 CD Vinyl's that look like records. They return Unknown for an MID. So, since I know from past experience that Verbatim uses CMC for their CD-R's now, I've been reading and rewriting them, just in case.
  17. Happy to impart what little knowledge I possess that is useful.
  18. Mostly for compatibility with standalone DVD players. I mostly burn movies to DVD. Although, ironically, for DVD-9's, DVD+R DL is what I use because they are, strangely, more compatible with standalone DVD player than DVD-R DL's.
  19. I don't use DVD+R but I do know that these Verbatim Lightscribe DVD-R's are MCC's. I use them all the time. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0014IWVTK/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
  20. Unfortunately, you can't. Anyone can put anything in the MID field. Fake SONY were made for a long time. Same thing with what's on the label. The Memorex label is on their DVD media, but, CMC makes it.
  21. Image burn can handle music CD images, just not Roxio's .GI. It's probably a proprietary format that Roxio owns and, therefore, a license would have to be paid to support the file type in ImgBurn. For music CD images, ImgBurn supports, at least, BIN/CUE and ISO. I think a search for .GI was rejected because it's under the minimum number of characters the board demands you search for. It's idiotic, if you ask me, because what if you need to find something like .GI because you can't! Of course, this is the same board software that wouldn't allow the word "python" in posts without formatting around it at one time!
  22. I would have lay the blame on the manufacturer of the media. CMCMAG is CMC Magentics. 50% of the time, their stuff won't finish writes, so, it doesn't surprise me that their stuff won't finish erasing/formatting either. It could also be that your drive doesn't like CMC BD-RE so it may be down to the drive, but, either way, I'd blame CMC for it. Did you buy these in a store or online? If you bought them in a store, what company label is on the packaging so I'll know to steer clear of them. I've only ever used 3 BD-RE's. 1 Sony which died after 5 writes, typical Sony quality. Several Memorex BD-RE which are made by Ritek. 1 Verbatim which is made by Verbatim/Mitsubishi. Oh, looks like LUK replied at the same time I was replying.
  23. dbminter

    Video Nasties?

    The only Nazisploitation I've ever seen is Ilsa She Wolf Of The SS. About the only use for the picture is if you like copious amounts of female nudity. Hell Of The Living Dead used to completely banned. Now, it's been passed uncut for like the past 11 years.
  24. dbminter

    Video Nasties?

    It had been looking good as some of the Video Nasties were finally being released uncut. Yes, Nazisploitation, like Caligula Reincarnated As Hitler.
  25. dbminter

    Video Nasties?

    Does the BBFC still edit UK home video releases like they did during the days of the Video Nasties?
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