[l008com]

I keep burning discs for someone, and they keep getting the discs and telling me they don't work. So the last time I burned a disk, I took an MD5 checksum of the .rar file that I was burning. I checksum'd it as soon as I downloaded it, then I took one off the disc after I burned it. It was the same. This guy gets the disc, and the .rar is corrupt. But he can copy it off of the disc, there are no read errors, the .rar just won't decompress. And when he does an MD5, he gets a completely different result.

So, is this possible? Would data on a DVD-R go 'bad' in such a way, where it would NOT cause read errors, but WOULD cause the data to simply change? My feeling is he's bullshitting me.

[Eug]

Dunno but it is theoretically possible methinks. What media are you using? If I don't use top tier media, I encounter all sorts of errors. Things that work on one drive won't consistently work on another.

[l008com]

It's a spool that has had some bad burns. But a bad burn that manifests as disc read errors. Never changing data. Plus it happened twice with the same .rar but other things worked fine.

[Eug]

Well, I will point out that I have burned cheap discs that fail the disc verification, but when I actually load the discs they seem to work. But I just throw them out anyway just in case.

IOW, cheap discs are a waste of time and money IMO.

[l008com]

These are discs that passed verification, and copied their entire contents to my computer, and his computer, without any errors.

[Eug]

Why don't you just try a better quality disc and see what happens? In the meantime, try something other than RAR maybe?

[l008com]

I have used these discs for other things and never had a problem. And I'm doing a password protected RAR because thats what this person wanted me to burn for him. These are the only DVDrs I have right now, I'm not going to go buy another stack just for this. Plus the more I talk about it, the more sure I am that he's BSing me.