Ages ago, I purchased a HP 9110i CDRW drive (firmware since upgraded to 1.0c). It came bundled with Adaptec EasyCD Creator 3.x (not sure about the exact version) and DirectCD (again, not sure about version, but not newer than 2.x). I used DirectCD to backup several files to CDRW discs. Now, several years later, I'm having problems reading them. I'm still using the same HP drive, and I have another optical drive, a Pioneer DVD-114. As I mentioned before, the HP drive's firmware is version 1.0c.

The problem doesn't occur with all the discs I wrote back then, just some of them. I'm using Windows XP Home SP1. Although WinXP can read UDF discs by default, it failed to read the problem disc at all. After downloading and installing Adaptec's UDF Reader driver, I can now get a file listing in Windows Explorer. I'm trying to copy the files to my hard drive to avoid any future problems. Reading the problem disc is extremely slow. Getting a directory takes several minutes. Trying to copy more than 10 files at a time to the hard drive takes an inordinate amount of time. Selecting all the files on the disc causes Explorer to crash. I've tried using the Pioneer drive to read/copy the files, with no difference. Accessing the disc is extremely slow.

I came across a technical article on Roxio's site which suggested that turing off CD-ROM read ahead caching might alleviate this problem. Unfortunately there's no way to do this in XP. All I want to do is get these files off of the disc and onto the hard drive.

Packet writing is unreliable at the best of times.. So it is not suprising that a several year old disc has problems.

Perhaps try ISOBuster or similar and see if it can do better then explorer.