I've tried several-freeware, shareware...you name it. Most ended up corrupting my cds...the worst of these offenders was Nero :( Any suggestions? My CD stack is quickly diminishing and I'd like to back up everything before my drive crashes again...its been acting wierd.

I use Nero, and have had no problems at all. In what way did Nero corrupt your CD's? If you forget to select ISO Level 2 within the options you may find that long file names get truncated...which is no fault of Nero. Another thing you can do is relax the ISO restrictions to allow a greater path depth. Also, if you are having problems, ensure all background tasks are not running (i.e. Virus scanner, Norton System Utilities etc), and see if this improves the success rate. What hardware are you using, and are you still working while the burning proccess is happening? Multi tasking and CD burning do not seem to go well together and can be a bit of a risk. Cheers

Here's an interesting thing :) I use whatever is built into Win XP... I have used Nero, Easy cD creator, and a couple of others that I downloaded...all made there fair share of coasters and corrupted CDs..... The Win XP software has performed flawlessly....believe it or not...no coasters since February, no corrupted CDs, and they all work on all of my systems. I believe the Win XP software is Roxio...not sure....but why it works great like this, and the normal retail or packaged products don't, is beyond me

I use the XP burner also. I now get about 99% sucsess. Adaptech EASY CD Creator was a real coaster maker. In XP you just drag and drop your files into your CD drive folder,then select"Copy these files to CD" Easy Peezy Japaneezy works every time. I must say that is one thing Microsoft did right. What Operating System are you useing Desdemmonna ? Tom

Windows 98, turn off all non-essential proggies when its burning :) Basically what happens is that in the final process during burning there will be an error and the burning will complete but the CD will be unreadable...its as if the cd directory or whatever isn't written. Info is burned onto cd, computer just can't read it.

No problem at all with the latest WinOnCD. Tons of crap with the Adaptec EasyCD, though my son begs to differ on that opinion, LOL. I also learned the HARD way to make at least 2 copies of irreplaceable files.

XP here, no probs at all.

well i once installed a nero demo and it wrecked my pc, all icons ended up being the windows "we don't know what you are" ones so i had to format the pc.....now with this new burner it installed nero before i realised what it was and its worked flawlessy, must be on my 200th cd and not one failure, so in my opinion its close your eyes and pick one :o).......Steve

LOL! Just successfully burned a cd finally...was out getting the Sunday paper and found a stack of CD's at the dollar store ($0.33 each!) and bought every single one. maybe its just the CD's I had perviously that were bad...although at $0.33 a pop I'm inclined to believe it was just dumb luck this time :)

one tip..once you find a brand that works stick with them...Steve

I use Easy CD Creator Platinum on Win XP and make sure the Buffer Underrun Prevention option is selected because if not it will create a coaster. Then to make life easier, I uninstall Poser 4 then go back and delete any unnecessary files such as the default figures and start selecting folders and files that will fit on each CD. It's a pain to do it this way, but is wonderful when finished. Several months later I do it again after adding more content that I haven't bothered to keep track of. I'm up to seven CD's now. I'm sure there's an easier way, but since ECDC does not let you select the entire runtime folder and swap CDs, this seems to be the only method.

Good point Steve...I had some bad experiences with Fuji CD's, and had a terrible failure rate with them. I now use Philips or Maxell, and find them very reliable...can't remember the last coaster. I'm sure somebody out there will/could contradict me though LOL! Cheers

i use maxon or intenso, the latter usually coz i buy a stack of 50 cheap :o).....Steve

Just some additional info. If any of you one day find your CDROM corrupted etc...don't throw them away. There is this utility call "CDR Diagnostic". What it does is that it read all the stuff in your bad CD and allow you to drag and drop to anywhere you want...real life saver!

CDR Diagnostic ? How much is that utility? I have stack of corrupted CD's I've saved along the way from the old Adaptech/Win 98 days. Also...When I try to read a CD created a long time ago(from those days) It's asks me to install the utf reader that was placed there during it's creation. But XP says "NO WAY" and wont unstall the reader. What's up with that? any way to work around that ? Glad you got your problem resolved Desdemmonna. CD creation can be very frustrating. Tom

Attached Link: http://www.arrowkey.com/index.html

Oh...forgot to memtion this. Read recently somewhere that using normal marker to label your CD can be a hazard. The ink chemical may react with the silk screen layer over a period of time and corrupt your data which sit just underneath. There are CD markers with special formulated ink just made for the job. if you find your old working CD unable to read after a long time, the general markers ink you use may be the culprit.

Nero. Always works, never a coaster, no threat to imminent OS destruction like EZ HD Destroyer (can you tell I don't like EZ?) Nero is also cheap and comes with a lot of new burners (Lite-on! WOO!).

YAY! These dollar store cd's copy like a dream :) I'll be offline most of the day tommorrow...but I'll finally get my huge storage folder OFF the drive. Yeah, CD corruption wasn't my burner/Nero's fault...was the damned Maxwell disks.

I use Adaptec/Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 with great success...I (and others) have found using Direct CD (which is what is in Win XP) gave me cd's that get harder and harder to read(slower & slower) over time....so I never use it anymore including the version I have with XP....

I use Nero and highly recommend it over the easy cd creator products from adaptec and roxio. Nero is rock solid on my system. no blue screens, no nothing, just a workhorse. I honestly can't say that about CD creator 4 or 5. Tons of BSOD's with those two.

I use to use Easy CD creator and I liked it before the XP fiasco. Then I tried Nero and RecordItNow. Both work well. Never made a coaster yet. Burn a lot of stuff. Nero is easier to use. Kevin

Oh, yeah...I meant to add the trouble with the built in burner software, which was supplied by Roxio, the makers of Easy CD creator---figure that out (Why did it work, but the full version had so much trouble?) and with RecordItNow is that there doesn't appear to be a way to tell what's already burned on the disk, so it's hard to know what needs to be added, if you're making multi-session cds. But Nero makes this simple. It adds them for you, if you just check the option for that. Makes my life simplier. Kevin

I used Easy CD Creator under Win98 with a USB burner. No problems. Occasional coasters (about 3 out of 200) which I attribute to bad cds. Now have XP and Roxio. Use Disk at Once only and it works great. Except for a batch of CompUSA disks that were trash. Right now am using 12x rated Memorex CD's and writing at 24x on my Lite-on. Perfect.

I guess I am in the minority. I used Adaptec for a year or so and had not a single problem. Now use Roxio and still not a single problem. We go through a LOT of CDs at work (about a thousand or so this year) but they are on our automated duplicator. It's flawless. But shuffling through CDs that we bulk order...you'd be surprised to see some come with no coating! You can see through them like a haze! As to CDs? I think they're like VCRs. One company makes most of them and others just put their names on them. I tend to buy from companys that I THINK "do their own thing", like TDK or Maxell. Sometimes, a bit more costly that what our agency wants to spend. I look at it the same way a guy once told me about film when I was a practicing photographer: "Think of film as being free," he said, "or otherwise you'll never get the right picture." That's a loose analogy for remembering your data is WORTH it! Spend a few extra cents for each CD. I promise this: if you load a CD one day and discover you can't read it, you'll regret being a cheap ass! As an IT person at work, I can tell you lots of people approach us and ask what happened to their CD. One other item. Go to Neato.com. Not sure it's the case now, but they USED to have a really good writeup on CDs and what makes them go wrong and reflection importance (how scratches on the "label" side are worse than on the "recorded" side, etc.

I don't bother with a CD. I use hard drives. I have over 4 gigs of poser stuff, 2 gigs of art assets and another 4 gigs of poser misc stuff that's not in the poser dir. That's at least 20 CDs. Hard drives are cheap now. $100 will get you 80 gigs. I also use the removable drive bays which are drive bays that fit in a 5.5 slot and have drawers that let you slide a drive in and out. Basically I have two 80 gig drives that I alternate for backups every 2 or 3 days. I just let it run the copy overnight and alternate the drives. This way I'm never more than 2 days behind and even if one drive goes bad its no more than 4 days behind.

I had major problems with a box of TDK discs I bought in desperation once, no trouble with Memorex which I have seen others scorn. One nice thing with Nero 5.5 is it will verify your data (not that I don't open the files anyway, but it's an extra check).