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First post, by mhdbox385

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I have three cd-roms to be used with a pentium-100 DOS pc.
For clarity let's name them cdrom1, cdrom2 and cdrom3.
Cdrom1 works good with all CDs.

Cdrom2 and cdrom3 were problematic, friend suggested to clean the lens, I did so, that did not solve the problem.
But I noticed that cd-rom2 fails to read Elba CD most of the time (~80%), but always reads credit card CD.
Cdrom3 almost always fails to read Elba CD (~95%), but always reads credit card CD.

What could be the problem with these cd-roms and can be fixed?
(photo of CD's attached)

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Reply 1 of 8, by Caluser2000

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Early CDRoms drives were incabable of coping with CD-R or CD-RWs

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 2 of 8, by Jo22

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Hi, *if* memory serves, I was once able to read a CD-R with a Mitsumi Lu005 single-speed drive..
Also, that Mitsumi drive was able to read mixed-mode CD-ROMs just fine (data/audio; PC/MAC etc),
which a newer double-speed drive of mine wasn't able too.

However, that was years ago. Perhaps the CD-R type was a different one. 😅
There were so many types of blank CDs around at the time.

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In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 3 of 8, by Caluser2000

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AZO CD-Rs possible but not the newer stuff.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 4 of 8, by Vynix

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And even that you have to burn your CDs at the lowest speed possible (ideally 1x for the very early ones), but again it might cause problems with certain drives.

Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]

Reply 5 of 8, by elianda

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as Caluser2000 already wrote, use AZO CD-Rs for early CD-ROM drives. Though these medias are difficult to get and mostly in questionable state.

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Reply 7 of 8, by DankEngihn

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Do the drives themselves work? It could be that they're only able to read the credit card CD because the laser can't move far enough to read the other disks.

I have seen this before on older CD drives, and in the case of two of them, there was something jammed in the way of the laser so it couldn't move far enough to read the last cm or so on the edges of CDs. The other ones needed to be relubrucated.

Try them on a more modern drive that you are sure works.

Reply 8 of 8, by mhdbox385

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Update: more information about the drives.

cd-drive that reads credit card cd, fails to read Elba cd-r 95% of time: ACER 624A (24X) (MANUFACTURED 1998)
cd-drive that reads credit card cd, fails to read Elba cd-r 80% of time: LG GCR-8523B (52X) (MANUFACTURED 2005, ROM VER 1.03)

The drives aren't very old imo, I don't think they are intended for cd-rom only (https://www.cnet.com/products/lg-gcr-8523b-cd … ive-ide-series/)

(note: the is no problem about Elba cd-r, as my other working cd drive reads it without problem, just as good as it reads credit card cd.)

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