Living in the PAST - Column

Emedia Professional, March, 1999 by Robert A. Starrett

you would think it a safe assumption that I could record a disc at will, and successfully at that. I have more than a few recorders, dating back to 1990, and every piece of recordable software ever produced. I have five PCs in my main office, several in another, and each has one or more recorders in it. So you might think that I could blast out discs at will. That somewhere in there I'd have a state-of-the-art, untouchable, infallible recording system. But you would be wrong.

bungles in the jungle

The morass of CD-R drives, software, and media in various states I call my office is like a museum in need of a curator. But at its core are all the latest and greatest tools of the trade, so when I tried to make a copy of a typical 300MB disc the other day, I expected an 8-minute, 4X experience. But what I got was an all-day ordeal.

Between virtual device drivers, ASPI layers, different SCSI drivers and cards, nothing worked. First I tried my main machine, which is equipped with a Sony and a Ricoh drive. But the software failed to recognize the recorders--the Sony was too new to be supported and the Ricoh was too old. So I tried installing another software, which meant first uninstalling the current software to prevent conflicts. As Install-Shield worked its magic I received the message, "Some items could not be removed." Never mind that Install-Shield had installed the problematic items in the first place.

So I installed the latest version of another program that I knew supported the Sony drive. After rebooting, I clicked on the icon and got the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. I checked the windows\system\iosubsys directory to look at the virtual device drivers for I/O, many times the culprit. Sure enough, the previous program did not uninstall its virtual I/O drivers. I deleted them and rebooted. The machine locked. I booted up in safe mode and uninstalled the second recording program. Rummaging around in a pile of CDs and floppies, I retrieved yet a third recording program, also a Sony supporter, and began installation. The third screen asked for my registration number--as if that needle-thick sliver of cardboard could be found under my haystack. I appreciate the usefulness of serial numbers, but for people like me they usually spell disaster.

I aborted the installation and sat down to think. Surely one machine had a workable setup. I tried my NT machine, which had both a TEAC recorder and a trusty Plextor ROM drive. I fired up a recording program, verified that it recognized the TEAC recorder, popped the source disc into the Plextor and the destination blank into the TEAC, and began the disc copy. "No blank disc inserted," the program responded.

I took out the disc and examined it carefully. You can usually tell whether a disc is blank or not by looking at it, as any recorded area is a slightly different color than the unrecorded area. This one was the same color throughout. I tried it again and incurred the same error. Was it uniform in color because it was full? I put it into the drive and did a directory of it. The message returned: "A device attached to the system is not functioning properly." But which device? The device I am trying to access or another device? And does device mean drives? Expansion cards? Keyboards? Printers? Scanners? Joysticks? Back to the drawing board.

Over in the corner, I have a Cyrix GX machine with sound and video built into the processor. Eyeing it, I vaguely recalled recording a disc on it some time ago and not changing anything since then. Reassured, I fired it up, inserted a blank piece of media, and lo and behold, I was recording! All was well with the world--until I got that "Track Following Error ..."

thick as a brick (and just as sturdy)

Because I read the newsgroups, and personally receive similar (if less grandiose) tales of woe, I know that many people have problems with various recorders, software, and host machine setups, so I don't feel alone. But increasingly I wonder if CD recording is not the simple saviour for personal data storage and distribution that we all seem to think it is. It has now become a contest of bells and whistles and low-cost recorders. Some recorders are obviously hardier than others. Some programs have better drive handling than others and many do not use their own virtual I/O drivers, which cause many of the problems that I see. Some people have less trouble than others. Those who have the most trouble are often running the latest stuff, which is not to run down the latest drives.

Want me to recommend a drive and software setup that works all the time? Here it is: A Pentium running MS-DOS 6.22 (not common) with a Philips CDD 522 (no longer available) and Meridian Data's Personal Scribe Software (killed early in its product cycle). It's in the other room, it's low-tech and limited in functionality, but that baby will cut discs all day long.

Good luck finding one outside a museum.

Robert A, Starrett [bobs@cdpage.com) is a contributing editor for EMedia Professional. co-columnist for THE CD WRITER, and an independent consultant based in Denver, Colorado, He is the coauthor of CD-ROM Professional's CD-Recordable Handbook.