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File corruption. Failing CD or Faulty Drives?

NeXT

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Oct 22, 2008
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Kamloops, BC, Canada
I'm scratching my head over weather or not this is some sort of fault brought on by newer drives, a bad press or what. Visibly the disc is immaculate.
This is the Bonus CD for my Forte VFX1. All the bundled games included additional special drivers and plugins to support the headset. None of the executables work and any sort of batch or textfile is full of garbage. The kick is that there's always the highlighted sting of text as seen in the picture, no matter what kind of file it is.

corrupt.png


Doesn't matter if I try on 9x or NT or DOS or XP. I've tried DVD drives, CD-RW drives....same thing. :confused:
It kinda screws me over as I don't know of anyone making a backup of the CD.
 
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Possibly. I toyed with the hardware something like five years ago on another machine before I moved and it went in storage all this time. I tried my usual round of CD recovery software but nope, looks like I'm screwed unless someone made a copy of the disc. (and I know there's more copies of it floating around)
 
I'm scratching my head over weather or not this is some sort of fault brought on by newer drives, a bad press or what. Visibly the disc is immaculate.

Has the disk ever worked?

This doesn't make any sense beyond a bad mastering. You wouldn't be able to read the sector at all if it was that screwed up.

You may want to try ripping it with CD Paranoia just to see what (if any) error messages it throws.
 
Can you post the contents of one of the shorter executable files? If it's just a matter of stripping off a header, that should get you your files back.
 
Easy--I'm trying to determine if the RIFF header has been added to everything (mistake) or if it's overwriting something.

So take a small executable program, copy it off the CD, ZIP it up and post it. Executable program files have a definite structure.
 
Well, both files are well-formed RIFF files, which would indicate that they contain AVI data. But they don't contain what their names would indicate. Looks pretty screwed up to me.
 
I agree with Al.

Someone made a mistake while mastering the CD. Clearly you can get directory listings with file names etc and this would not be possible if there was something physically wrong with the CD. The file headers are typical for wave format files (.wav) so it's as if the software used converted the files into wave format before writing. All you have to do is figure out a way to convert the sound data back to the original files. :D
 
VERY interesting!

Someone sent me an ISO backup of the disc so I could have a local copy. The burned disc exhibited the exact same file corruption however when the ISO was extracted directly to disk the corruption was not present.

It seems bizarre that a shareware disc would have copy protection, but it feels suspiciously like that.
 
It is original. Actually, now that I thought more about it, I really can't figure out WHY both a copy and an original would corrupt in the same manner.
 
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