Review: CD Check

Don Bradbury looks at a freebie CD copy checker

Product	CD Check
Company	Internet Security Systems
Web	fusion.zejn.si
Price	£free
We like
We don't like
Rating	8/10
Requirements

Backing up important data in a CD burn might leave you wondering if the integrity of the copy was intact. Unlike copies made to the usual range of computer recording media, where the operating system can provide checks for integrity, CDs are burned without an absolute check against the original.

Filling this niche is CD Check, a little utility program from a company called Fusion. The author offers it as a free service, although he does invite contributions from the satisfied and interested.

Zip download

CD Check is downloaded as a 300K zip file from the author's web site, and the zip contains the executable file together with a very brief readme note on the product. So you simply run the zip file through Winzip or a similar unzipping application, and perhaps make the executable available from the Windows Desktop for convenience.

Running the program creates an INI file of your preferences, but that's about it. The entire system is kept very simple. You can open the Options menu and set your preferred way of working, including the number of your drives available for checking. By default that's just your CD/DVD drive and your CD burner drive, but you can open it up if you want (as in the graphic)

To check the readability of a CD, you just pop it in any CD drive and point to it in the drives list, then click the Check CD button. Wait several minutes for the read to finish, and hope there are no error messages in the lower box.

CD Compare

To make a comparison between an original and a copy, you pop the former in your CD drive and the latter in your burner drive, nominate the drive containing the original, click on Compare, and let CD Check read both CDs to ensure an identical copy. You get a report showing read rates, files/folders checked, and elapsed time. Basic, but it's all you need.

During file comparison, both CD drives are, of course, active, but the hard disk is active, too. That's because all files on the CDs are actually compared from hard disk copies.

TADA!

You can switch on a WAV file of your choice to signal the end of processing, but I had to copy that file to a CDCheck folder first before it would work. Being in the Windows path was not sufficient to ensure that TADA.WAV was active in conjunction with CDCheck on my system. No problem; I copied CDCheck.exe and its INI file to a disk folder under Program Files, and I put a shortcut to the EXE file on the Windows Desktop.

Although you can nominally deactivate CD autorun from the CDCheck menus, it didn't work for me. The author puts a comment on this on his website. Although a Registry access is involved, necessitating a restart of Windows, I still found the facility inactive. It's not a major problem; I just hold down the shift key while CDs are inserted to prevent autorun.

Finally, I should point out that although there is a Quick Test facility in CD Check, this, too, isn't really available in the sense that the author (I checked) believes it to be "insecure". Quick Test doesn't actually read anything; it only opens the handle of files for the check. That might spot the odd error, but the author says he'll drop Quick Test in the next release of CD Check.

In conclusion

CD Check works well enough, and it replaces rather neatly the old DOS Diskcomp facility, or Diskcopy /v where files were read back on the fly from conventional recording media to check their integrity during copying.

 

Don Bradbury