I was give a CD by a mate which contained a 700Mb avi file and the Xvid codec [348k] burned on to it. In each of my drives [LTR-40125S and LTD-163D] the disk would show a file list in Windows Explorer but any attempt to access the files would see the drives spin up and down with noises suggesting the heads were moving, but no obvious sign of the disk being read. This would go on for about 5 minutes before it gave up and gave control back to me.

I imaged the disk with the 163D and CloneCD expecting to see hundreds of errors listed, but none came up. Mounted the image in the VirtualDrive and copied the files across to the hard disk fine. I was then able to burn the 700Mb avi onto another disk and read it fine.

Quotes from the owner of the original disk;

'Funny, that's what happened to me when I tried to read it too!'

'It burned fine, and with no errors'

'The ATIP [of the original disk] said nominal capacity was 702.43Mb so there should have been space'

Anyone able to explain what was going on in simple terms?

As an aside the highest read speed CloneCD calculated was 57.42x - not bad for a 48x reader!