DVD+RW Disc Suddenly Died

[win98]

I have purchased one of the Optodisc DVD+RW (OP470), formatted it using Nero's InCD and using less than 10 times on my Optorite DD0203 drive. 2 days back, the drive suddenly took more than 5 minutes to detect the disc, after which it was unable to recognize the UDF contents on the disc, only the non-UDF portion.

I tried erasing the disc in Nero, but the disc was ejected in less than 5 seconds and format failed (both quick and long format). Luckily I was able to retrieve the UDF contents of the disc using CDRoller.

I think this could be a manufacturing defect, first of all there are no dirt and scratches on the disc, as I was very careful with it, and secondly my drive still works with my Verbatim DVD+RWs.

Does anyone have problems with DVD+RW media, in particular Optodisc? How can I force a format using some tool so that the disc can be made usable again, or is it because of some manufacturing defect?

[Phoenix '97]

I'm using Optodisc DVD-RW (1x) media with no problems... one of the discs I have lying around here I've used for like 8 months and have probably re-written to about 30 times already.

[jase]

The problem with all the RW formats (CD and DVD) IMHO is that when they are written to with a bad writing strategy, they're often rendered totally unusable -- and this effect seems to be cumulative, making matters worse, as you have experienced. And anyone who has run a KProbe scan on CDRW media will know how comparatively high the C1 rates can be. -RAM seems to be immune to this effect, but that's a different subject.

I know it isn't too helpful, but you may just have to put this one down to experience, and buy different media next time.

This could actually be seen in a way as a weakness of the +RW format; although it's great that it can remove data from the middle of a disc and rewrite it without having to erase the whole thing, in practise I don't think the media is stable enough to sustain repeated random rewrites (with different parts of the disc experiencing differing levels of wear, so you don't know straight away that the disc has expired).

[CDRecorder]

Yes, C1 error rates are usually high on CD-RW discs; in fact, I have even seen CD-RW discs with large numbers of C2 errors if I used a less than high-quality drive to write the disc.