An uncorrectable error that isn't!

[tjinperspective]

About six months ago, I was able to rip all twenty-four DVDs with all two hundred episodes of "That '70s Show" to an external hard drive with my old Dell Inspiron 5537's built-in hard drive with absolutely no issues. I now have a Dell Inspiron 7558 and I'm borrowing my father's portable DVD drive he sometimes uses for his job for all my DVD ripping needs. ImgBurn is a great program in that watching videos on DVDs has never been as easy as just opening a file from the Windows Explorer, not to mention I won't ever have to worry about losing what I paid good money for if any of my DVDs should get lost, stolen, damaged or destroyed. It came across as strange to me that when I was ripping the sixteenth of twenty-four DVDs for the show, the portable DVD drive lagged for a few minutes and the ImgBurn log told me the drive failed to read numerous sectors of one of twenty-four discs I ripped perfectly fine the first time on my old laptop's internal drive. It would send me in a tailspin if this disc is already starting to lose its reliability having owned it for only about eighteen months now. Interestingly enough, ImgBurn said there were no read errors and no retries and it was able to complete the operation successfully. We all know the expected result is for there to be an ISO file that looks and sounds exactly the same as if I was playing the disc on a DVD drive. I have no idea how ImgBurn was still able to get a perfectly exact copy of that DVD if it wasn't able to read numerous sectors, as you'll find out by the log I have copied and pasted below from the program. I'm not sure if the ISO file that is now on my external hard drive is exactly the way it should be without any compromises in audio quality and/or picture quality, but I really need to know how an error like this would not necessarily prevent ImgBurn or the DVD drive from having my ISO file for me exactly as we ImgBurn users expect it to be. And as of 2:32 PM EDT as I am writing this post, I've had another "L-EC Uncorrectable Error" on the seventeenth disc on this twenty-four disc set I speak of, the second disc of season six.

 

I 13:57:42 Operation Started!
I 13:57:43 Source Device: [0:0:0] ThinkPad Ultraslim DVD YL31 (E:) (USB)
I 13:57:43 Source Media Type: DVD-ROM (Book Type: DVD-ROM)
I 13:57:43 Source Media Supported Read Speeds: 2x, 4x, 6x, 8x
I 13:57:43 Source Media Sectors: 4,016,048 (Track Path: OTP - L0: 2,026,880 - L1: 1,989,168)
I 13:57:43 Source Media Size: 8,224,866,304 bytes
I 13:57:43 Source Media Volume Identifier: 70sS6_D1
I 13:57:43 Source Media Volume Set Identifier: 410d4f7c
I 13:57:43 Source Media Implementation Identifier: DVDAfterEdit
I 13:57:43 Source Media File System(s): ISO9660, UDF (1.02)
I 13:57:43 Read Speed (Data/Audio): MAX / 8x
I 13:57:43 Destination File: D:\That '70s Show - Season 6, Disc 1.iso
I 13:57:43 Destination Free Space: 733,962,780,672 Bytes (716,760,528.00 KiB) (699,961.45 MiB) (683.56 GiB)
I 13:57:43 Destination File System: NTFS
I 13:57:43 File Splitting: Auto
I 13:57:44 Read Speed - Effective: 3.3x - 8x, 8x - 3.3x
I 13:57:46 Reading Session 1 of 1... (1 Track, LBA: 0 - 4016047)
I 13:57:46 Reading Track 1 of 1... (MODE1/2048, LBA: 0 - 4016047)
I 13:57:46 Reading Layer 0... (LBA: 0 - 2026879)
I 14:09:56 Reading Layer 1... (LBA: 2026880 - 4016047)
W 14:10:53 Failed to Read Sectors 2181280 - 2181311 - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error
W 14:11:09 Failed to Read Sectors 2199104 - 2199135 - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error
W 14:11:25 Failed to Read Sectors 2217920 - 2217951 - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error
W 14:11:41 Failed to Read Sectors 2236992 - 2237023 - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error
W 14:11:57 Failed to Read Sectors 2256064 - 2256095 - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error
W 14:12:14 Failed to Read Sectors 2276544 - 2276575 - Reason: L-EC Uncorrectable Error
I 14:21:36 Exporting Graph Data...
I 14:21:36 Graph Data File: C:\Users\tjinp\AppData\Roaming\ImgBurn\Graph Data Files\ThinkPad_Ultraslim_DVD_YL31_MONDAY-MAY-23-2016_1-57_PM_N-A.ibg
I 14:21:36 Export Successfully Completed!
I 14:21:36 Operation Successfully Completed! - Duration: 00:23:46
I 14:21:36 Average Read Rate: 5,632 KiB/s (4.2x) - Maximum Read Rate: 9,465 KiB/s (7.0x)

[dbminter]

It probably did eventually read the sectors on a retry.  If it really couldn't read the sectors fully, ImgBurn should have prompted out and asked you if you wanted to continue.

 

 

Why you're probably having issues with the other drive is it's an external one.  It's probably a slim, and slim drives are nothing but problematic.