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Re: [LUG] antique CD players

 

Tom Potts wrote:
> 
> 2 Questions 
> 1) could an old cd reader have trouble with new cds - it seems to be able to 
> read them tho not boot from them..

Yes.

It would almost certainly be down to BIOS bugs, but it is known that
some hardware vendors didn't implement the whole multi-boot variant of
the El Torito standard.

> 2) is there any analysis software that can look at a cd and 'check' it?

First;

What message if any do you get when trying to boot?
Do the CDs work in other machines?
Are there BIOS updates available?

A classic thing to check the CD, is to test the ISO image from hard disk
(QEMU for example), and to check the chksum of disk versus ISO. At which
point you can be reasonably sure the CD has what it should, and boots.

I don't know how to check the detailed start of the CD, to ensure it is
standard compliant. But I'd probably go with a floppy boot and use the
CD as a source media if I was just trying to revive the PC.

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