On Fri, 17 Mar 2006 20:58:18 GMT, (Brad) put
finger to keyboard and composed:

From time to time, I come across an article about CD roms, etc.
What I have learned so far, CD-R (I use) is better than CD-RW for long
term storage of important data. Also, how they are stored can have
a bearing on their "life".

I keep CD roms in a dark cool location. To test the integrity of my
"burned" CD roms, I use "Finder" (search engine) I downloaded from
www.simtel.net. I "search" for a non-existant text pattern such as "i don't
exist" in order to get "Finder" to read through every file on the CD rom as a
way to check for corrupt data.

Is that for the Windows platform? If so, doesn't Windows' built-in
"Find Files and Folders" function do the same thing?

Otherwise, try this from a DOS prompt:

echo f | xcopy d:\ nul /c /h /s %temp%.\readtest.txt

This reads every file on the CD-ROM (drive D and copies it to the
NUL device, ie into the bit bucket. The results of each read are
recorded in readtest.txt.

- Franc Zabkar
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