Zup wrote on 2021-10-19, 09:59:

That reminds me two (almost) unrelated questions: - My wife computer has a LiteOn SHM-165S6S DVD drive that does not want to ope […]
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mockingbird wrote on 2021-10-18, 14:36:

If you're a more practical person, and you want something inexpensive that will cover all your bases, then you want either the LG GSA-H10x or GSA-H12x, both models being Renesas-based (as opposed to the lousy Panasonic varieties).

These drives don't need their capacitors changed, all they need is a belt cleaning or else the tray won't open.

That reminds me two (almost) unrelated questions:
- My wife computer has a LiteOn SHM-165S6S DVD drive that does not want to open. The symptons are that when you push the open button or try to eject through explorer, it makes an "going to open"/"i better close that" noise (clac-clac) but the tray barely moves. If I force open it, it closes as intended (and sometimes it's able to reopen). May it be related to that belt (I thought a tray position sensor could be involved)?
- I've been trying to make ISOs from some spaniard edited games that had a "ring" protection. That is, a bunch (usually more than 5000) non-existant sectors that appears like a ring on the disc. Obviously, it takes ages to make an ISO image (more than 10 hours)... a better drive could mean faster image extraction?

If making a regular ISO, can't you just tell the software to not retry on read errors? What software are you using to make the ISOs?

Personally I've never had issues with reading CD-Rs on IDE drives 4x and newer. Even my old Acer 4x from back in the day (1995) was able to read them until I retired it years later. Now, CD-RW discs are a whole another issue, but then again I've never really used those.

When it comes to lifespan, I've found that high speed (starting at around 20x or more) CD drives kick the bucket really soon, while the older drives keep plodding along to this day. Back in the late 90's/early 00's I had to replace optical drives at a rate of one per year. I also had a similar experience with the early CD writers, my first one lasted about 3 months, the next one made it a little bit longer. Situation improved when DVDs became the norm.

I agree that 4x or 8x is the sweetspot for DOS games (and early Win9x), I still prefer using old drives for those as the slowdown utilities usually won't work properly with my faster drives. Either the drive slows down but not enough, or it doesn't work at all.

Zup wrote on 2021-10-19, 09:59:

That reminds me two (almost) unrelated questions:
- My wife computer has a LiteOn SHM-165S6S DVD drive that does not want to open<snip>

See my post here.

- I've been trying to make ISOs from some spaniard edited games that had a "ring" protection. That is, a bunch (usually more than 5000) non-existant sectors that appears like a ring on the disc. Obviously, it takes ages to make an ISO image (more than 10 hours)... a better drive could mean faster image extraction?

Try with Alcohol 120%, it should automate the process for you.

On a more (albeit unecessarily) technical level, if this is Safedisc, it's pretty easy, it's just fast error skip and something running in the background to block ATIP checking... The later protections were quite a bit more complicated and much more difficult to bypass.

Sorry, I didn't mean to answer this late...

mockingbird wrote on 2021-10-19, 17:10:

See my post here.

Cleaned that belt with nail polisher (my wife didn't have acetone), it works great. Looking at that open mechanism, it seems that it would benefit from a belt tensioner or a better quality belt... but the drive seems too cheap to have any of those advanced technologies. 🙁

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-10-19, 16:41:

If making a regular ISO, can't you just tell the software to not retry on read errors? What software are you using to make the ISOs?

mockingbird wrote on 2021-10-19, 17:10:

Try with Alcohol 120%, it should automate the process for you.

On a more (albeit unecessarily) technical level, if this is Safedisc, it's pretty easy, it's just fast error skip and something running in the background to block ATIP checking... The later protections were quite a bit more complicated and much more difficult to bypass.

I was using Imgburn, with 0 software retries and hardware retries disabled. The thing is that there are too many of them (other game from the same publisher had more than 5000) and in every error the drive seems to reset. I guess that better drives won't work better, but I had to ask.

The protection is a crappy custom one. They leave an "unrecorded" (or marked with laser) area in the disc, and put some fake files that point at that area. That unrecorded area seems like a ring when you look at the disc. The first sector sometimes throws a read error (I guess that the ring starts mid sector), the other sectors can't be found. On some games, it only verifies that a CD ROM with those fake files is present; on other games they even don't check for the files. On most cases, even a plain ISO image can defeat the protection... I guess they only wanted to make the dumping process a torture.

Zup wrote on 2021-10-21, 08:16:

Cleaned that belt with nail polisher (my wife didn't have acetone), it works great. Looking at that open mechanism, it seems that it would benefit from a belt tensioner or a better quality belt... but the drive seems too cheap to have any of those advanced technologies. 🙁

Nail polish remover usually is acetone (albeit a diluted form). Don't use nail polish remover that's not acetone.

The protection is a crappy custom one. They leave an "unrecorded" (or marked with laser) area in the disc, and put some fake files that point at that area. That unrecorded area seems like a ring when you look at the disc. The first sector sometimes throws a read error (I guess that the ring starts mid sector), the other sectors can't be found. On some games, it only verifies that a CD ROM with those fake files is present; on other games they even don't check for the files. On most cases, even a plain ISO image can defeat the protection... I guess they only wanted to make the dumping process a torture.

Yes, most drives can be instructed to do a fast error skip, but you need something like Alcohol 120% to do that... We're somewhat spoiled with "newer" drives that accomplish this. Back in the day you needed a specific drive that could support this command (Toshiba SD-M1212 comes to mind).