Interesting iTunes backup error

[goodforanother]

I had all of my iTunes music stored on a 160 gig external hard drive attached to my Powerbook G4. Well, that hard drive's power supply blew up, frying the drive. Since I had previously backed up my music to 10 DVDs through iTunes, I wasn't worried. I went off to the store and brought home a 320 gig MyBook.

Got the MyBook hooked up and working, and grabbed my backup DVDs. Brought the DVDs back out. Stuck in the first DVD, opened iTunes and began the backup.

It got through 15 songs before an error popped up, saying "Attempting to copy to the disk failed. The disk cannot be read from or written to." After clicking okay, it ejects the DVD and asks me to insert the next disc.

My first response was to just grab all the files off the DVD manually. But I ran into the same problem -- the 16th song wouldn't copy over, it said there was an error. I decided to copy every album except that particular one (Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap by AC/DC) and the rest of the DVD copied over fine. I figured it was just that one song that was corrupted or something.

Well, I stuck in the next DVD and there's about five songs on that DVD, all in separate albums, that won't copy over. Same error messages. So I ran Software Update, restarted and tried again (through iTunes) to backup. This time it got to 25 songs and had the same error. This time, when it asked me to either cancel the backup or insert a new disc, I just stuck the first DVD back in and hit continue. This appears to work, but it's really irritating and I'm afraid I'm going to lose a lot of my music when I get to the second disc.

I've tried to be as descriptive as possible but has anyone ever had anything remotely like this happen? Thanks in advance.

[Mikuro]

Did you verify your discs after burning them? Bad sectors are fairly common, especially with cheap media, so you should ALWAYS verify the data after burning. It sounds a lot like your discs just have bad sectors, in which case there's not much you can do about it — a few files will be unreadable.

However, the bit about "This time it got to 25 songs and had the same error" suggests there might be something more to it. You mean to say that it successfully copied a file it failed on before? In that case, you might be able to save them all with a few repeated attempts.

I think the Finder will not serve you well here, because it always stops every time it encounters an error, as you noticed. You'd be better off using Terminal, I think. In Terminal, type "cp -Ri " (with the trailing space), then drag your disc icon into the window, and then drag the folder you want to copy it to into the window. So the end result should look something like this:

cp -Ri /Volumes/Your_DVD /Volumes/Your_Hard_Disk/Destination_folder

This will copy all the files, and it will NOT stop if it encounters an error reading a file. Rather, it will tell you there was an error with that file and it will continue copying the rest of the folder, leaving the problematic file half-copied in the destination folder. Then you can go back and try to copy the particular files it failed on again and see if that will work.

I've heard that Toast 8 has a more robust method of copying files from hard-to-read discs. I've never tried it myself, but you might want to look into it.

[goodforanother]

Thanks for your help. I'll definitely give the Terminal a shot. And yes, it has copied several songs that it did not copy before. That's part of what confused me so much -- I figured it was a corrupt file, yet it seems to have the error on random songs and never the SAME songs. Really weird.