Verifying discs written in other progams

[shunsai]

If I burn a disc in a different program, but verify in ImgBurn, are ImgBurn's verification results valid, or is the verification process only valid for discs burned in ImgBurn? I'm honestly not completely clear on what the verification process is verifying- whether flaws in the physical disc, write errors, or differences between burned/original files. One program I burned in seems to have a completely different (and much longer and finickier) verifying process. When I wrote the developer to ask about it, all they said was "Our verification process differs from other burning software and takes much more time. In some situations Verify Tool is not able to read the file, but it does not mean the disc is corrupted."

Edited June 15, 2020 by shunsai

[LIGHTNING UK!]

Verify mode can work in 2 ways.

It’ll always check the drive is capable of reading every sector on the disc, but it can also check if the data within those sectors matches what’s in a disc image file on your hard drive.

No reason for it to take any longer than it takes to read the disc itself. The comparison side of things is much faster than the actual reading part. Optical drives are slow!

[shunsai]

1 hour ago, LIGHTNING UK! said:

Verify mode can work in 2 ways.

It’ll always check the drive is capable of reading every sector on the disc, but it can also check if the data within those sectors matches what’s in a disc image file on your hard drive.

No reason for it to take any longer than it takes to read the disc itself. The comparison side of things is much faster than the actual reading part. Optical drives are slow!

Thanks for replying so quickly. So I take it the disc I burned in BurnAware but verified in ImgBurn was probably just verifying that the sectors were readable, as there was no image file to compare. Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question, but does successful verification (in ImgBurn) mean I can trust the integrity of the data written on the disc (in BurnAware) and delete the original files? Could a file get corrupted during the write process, but the disc still pass verification?  I'm a bit skeptical of the other program's disc writing capabilities .

[LIGHTNING UK!]

You can only trust it if you compare against the image file. If you burnt in another program without the use of an intermediate image, you have no way of checking the data using ImgBurn.

That said, if you verify every sector is readable using verify mode (with ‘compare against image file’ disabled) and do a file level comparison against the stuff on your HDD that you originally burnt using something like Beyond Compare, that’s enough to say the disc is ok.

[shunsai]

Ok. That makes sense. Thank you.

[dbminter]

Just because the data can be read from a burned disc, doesn't necessarily mean the data was copied 1:1 successfully to the disc.  That's why if you have an image file, Verification against it is the easiest way to be sure the data was written properly to the disc.

 

As LUK said, you could use some other software or the DOS COMP command to compare your source files against the contents written to the disc.