RE: More CDs

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

I actually broke one in two by dropping it on the floor.  If any of you try 
to do this, you will find it almost impossible to break one in two with 
your bare hands.  OK, some of you might be able to do it.  ;^)  But it is 
hard.  The way I succeeded was that a heavy object (a hammer or some such, 
I forget) dropped off the table at the same time.  The disk landed on 
something so it was suspended at an angle, and the hammer dropped on top of 
it to give the disk a big shock.  I could not repeat the operation with a 
million monkeys, a million hammers, a million disks, and a million years, I 
think.

So you can damage a CD.  Easiest way is to scratch the top surfrace with 
something hard.

BTW, I have a good solution to packing CD's.  At one time I was selling a 
program that I shipped out on 5" floppies.  I still have a huge box of 
them.  I also have a huge box of "cold fusion" data taken on 5" 
floppies.  With a pair of scissors, you can cut one edge off a 5" floppy 
disk,  Then you can slide the old disk out and replace it with the 
CD.  This makes a very nice padded package with only one little strip of 
the metalization exposed.

A sad think to do with the device that revolutionized the personal computer 
biz, but it works.  ;^)  Next week I will tell you 101 things to make from 
a Z80.  #1 - Connect pin 1 and 3 between the terminals of your crystal set 
to improve operation over galena and a cat's whisker.

Tom Droege

At 12:35 PM 12/7/00 -0700, you wrote:

I have some speculation on how the damage happened.  My 2 year old managed
to push one of the stacks onto the hardwood floors, but since none came out
of the sleeves, I didn't bother checking them for problems.  Maybe Andrew
received that batch.  I remember hearing that CD's can be damaged by
dropping them on edge, so that's possibly what happened.


 >
 > The Doug Welch batch turned up today.
 > Neatly wrapped in white bond paper in a
 > padded envelope. No plastic worms, no stout cardboard
 > box. There is no justice. I now have the full set
 > apart from the damaged disks.
 >
 >
 > I have finally found the missing Bob Creager disk
 > firmly stuck to one of the damaged ones. I had to
 > pry them apart but it reads OK
 >
 > I now have a program that reads an entire CD and
 > writes a control file marking the files it can't
 > read so they don't get read again. It quits at the
 > first error in a file but judging by the noises the
 > reader tries very hard before it quits. The top disk,
 > with the worst damage, had 23 out of 80 files damaged.
 >
 > It seems that the slightest visible damage is enough
 > to make a file unreadable. Not too surprising!
 >
 > Andrew Bennett, Avondale Vineyard, Nova Scotia, Canada.
 >