brand-new DVD drives less reliable than crappy old player - fix?

[Chris Whitehouse]

Steve Franks wrote:
> I have a bunch of disks that will play fine in my laptop and TV, but
> not in my freebsd system with a new-ish NEC drive.  Figured it was the
> drive, so I got a new pioneer, same issue - scratch somewhere that
> causes no hiccup on other players makes it tank.  I can't even cp or
> rsync data off them, and these are only minor scratches.  Is there
> anything tunable, or ways  to keep rsync or cp going after an error?
> I get 100MB of the last GB file.  Most annoying.  I know you usually
> want cp to fail if there's read errors, but this is one instance where
> you'd like it to skip and keep going - I assume that's what my dvd
> player does.  These are not commercial disks, so I can't just go out
> and buy a new one, and I was too stupid to make backups, so I have a
> vested interest in a workaround.
> 
> Thanks,
> Steve
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It could still be hardware. I had similar symptoms with a recent new 
laptop. I had the DVD writer replaced under warranty with the same model 
and the engineer commented that it was a not uncommon problem, usually 
fixed by swapping the hardware.

Chris