Many drives from that era won't read burned CDs. Sometimes, burning CDs to a really slow speed helps ... if your burner can burn at such low speed. Otherwise use only originals, or use another CD drive

Right, I'm using disks burned at x16. I can go as low as x8 with this media/burner. That may still be too high though.

I always had this problem when I would try to burn CDs for my oldest CD-ROM. I'm not sure if 8x is going to be slow enough, and I have no idea why the slower burn seems to be a fix but it worked for me as well.

I'm still in the habit of burning CDs and DVDs at the slowest setting my drive allows because of that.

I don't know about the technical background as to why these old drives don't read CD-R's but that is very common among those drives. It is even more noticable with older cars from the mid-nineties which were equipped with early CD/radio units.

It's something to do with the laser in older drives not being powerful (?) enough to read the tracks on a burnt CD-R, compared to a pressed CD which would have "thicker" (??) tracks. Burning a CD-R at a lower speed apparently increases the "thickness" (???) of the tracks.

That said, old drives are often just worn out. A 1997 10X CD-ROM drive in one of my ancient laptops has lots of trouble reading CD-Rs burned at 2X.

IIRC CD-R are significantly less reflective and the pits and lands are significantly less well defined. The electronics in older drives are simply not good enough to properly read non standard discs.

I seem to remember however, that you might have better results with CD-Rs that have gold reflective surfaces, but I don't know if they are still being manufactured and even if they are they might not be of good enough quality anymore anyway. CD-R quality has dropped significantly in recent years. You would still have to write them as slow as possible to get better precision out of the writing process.

I really wished there was something like a gotek for CD/DVD-rom. Ideally with CCD support.

You can easily make very old CD readers to be compatible with CD-Rs by adjusting bias/gain of the laser. That will however shorten lifetime and if done wrong, can kill the laser at once.

derSammler wrote:

You can easily make very old CD readers to be compatible with CD-Rs by adjusting bias/gain of the laser. That will however shorten lifetime and if done wrong, can kill the laser at once.

I've done this before. Just adjust a tiny bit and then test. It usually only takes a very small adjustment for it to work.

That being said, it is probably a better idea to either use an IDE CD-RW drive or use a SATA CD-RW drive and an IDE to SATA adapter.

No more messing around with ancient drives that are getting harder to find and unreliable as well.

It all depends on the type and quality of the CD-R you use. The main problems with CD-R readability in old drives is reflectivity and jitter (variation in pit formation), the former can be remedied by using a good CD-R with high reflectivity and Long Strategy (Cyanine, Azo) dye with a silver reflective layer (silver has higher reflectivity than gold, that's why they used it exclusively in DVD's).

To achieve a good jitter and low BLER you need a good CD-R burner, no modern drive can burn CD-R's adequately so I would suggest you use something like an old Lite-On CD-RW drive (but NOT a DVD burner!), an LG burner manufactured before 2013 (Renesas/Panasonic chipset), Samsung burner made before ~2010 (up to model SH-223B) or an older Pioneer drive (<2006). Obviously avoid any notebook burners. Burning CD-R's at very low speeds (4x and lower) will not help at all, and may actually produce inferior results. Do not go lower than 8x or higher than 16x for best jitter results unless you're using <8x media, in which case burn it at rated speed.

As for choosing media, avoid any Phthalocyanine discs (the light green/yellow ones) due to the significantly lower reflective properties of that dye. Now that TY has stopped production your only choice is new old stock cyanine or metal azo discs. The best (that can still be found on ebay) were made by Taiyo Yuden (most post-16x Made in Japan stuff is TY) or Verbatim Metal Azo made in Japan, Singapore or Taiwan (Verbatim up to 16x with "Azo" written on the packaging). 74min CD-R's may also help, but I've never personally had a problem with 80min discs even on picky drives. It's all about the disc type and burn quality.

After buying a CD-R, the easiest way to check the type is by looking at the ATIP code (use something like Nero CDspeed's Disc Info tab), for reference the 80min codes Taiyo Yuden used were 97m 24s 00f and 97m 24s 01f, Verbatim Metal Azo was 97m 34s 20f and 97m 34s 21f. These are by far the most compatible CD-R's on drives with weak lasers.

I have a quad speed that read CD-R's just fine out of the box, but it sure wasn't universal until newer models.

It's really hit or miss whether an older CD-ROM drive will read a burned CD-R or not. For example, the 1995 4x drive in my 486 reads CD-R just fine, but the 1997 8x drive my old Compaq Presario 2200 had absolutely refused to read them at all, no matter what I tried.

Again, the type/formula of disc also affects the readability of CD-R in vintage drives. The lighter and closer to silver the back is, the more likely it will work. This is why (from my experience anyway) CD-RW discs tend to not work in drives older than ~1998-2000 that otherwise read CD-R just fine, since they use a much darker dye formula that's harder for the old drives to differentiate.

torindkflt wrote:

Again, the type/formula of disc also affects the readability of CD-R in vintage drives. The lighter and closer to silver the back is, the more likely it will work. This is why (from my experience anyway) CD-RW discs tend to not work in drives older than ~1998-2000 that otherwise read CD-R just fine, since they use a much darker dye formula that's harder for the old drives to differentiate.

It's the opposite, the best CD-R dyes were in fact the darkest hues made, ie. older (up to 8 or 12x) TDK cyanine and the original Metal Azo (which as far as I know is the darkest CD dye) are generally considered to be the most compatible with picky players, the Metal Azo discs are the only CD-R's that work with the original Playstation (1995) for example. So the darker cyanine/azo you can get the better, although before going out and buying any cyanine disc on ebay one should be conscious of the fact that some cyanine discs made in the 1990s had severe degradation issues (Taiwanese manufacturers like CMC Magnetics and Lead Data had horrible cyanine formulations) and achieved pretty bad burn quality as well. The newer Taiyo Yuden dyes (post-1997) had a slightly lighter cyanine formulation but it was still adequate, though not as good as aforementioned TDK's original cyanine or Verbatim Metal Azo.

It's true that the Phthalocyanine discs you are referring to (the light green/yellow ones) do work better than CD-RW's because the reflectivity is better. CD-RW's don't use a dye, they have a phase change material that is made of a metal-alloy film which blocks out a large amount of the laser beam and is thus even more difficult for drives to be able to distinguish the pits from the lands. So P-Cyanine is better than Phase Change, but it does not come close to the older, darker cyanine and azo formulations. It's not really possible to distinguish the reflectivity of a disc with the naked eye, and you would end up making incorrect conclusions as the one you did if you're not well-informed of the technical properties of recordable layers on CD-R's.

My rule of thumb is that a CD-ROM drive won't read a CD-R that is burned at a higher speed than it supports. I.e. a 2x CD-ROM drive won't read a disc burned at 4x, but an 8x drive will. At least that's been my experience.

Reminds me of a weird result, a CD player that didn't like CD-R, except for a batch of really cheap and nasty Fornet (oh boy, you really wanted to stay away from full capacity, as the error rate at the edge was dismal)