I’m posting this for a couple of reasons; someone else is bound to have this problem, and frankly I’m going to have the problem again someday, and in case I forget, I’ll be able to find this posting via Google and fix it faster than I did today.

Last night and this morning, my DVD drive was acting terribly. Burning a DVD at 8x took over an hour, and the computer was completely worthless while it was doing so…it couldn’t even play MP3 files without hanging and stuttering. But once I figured out what Windows XP had done to me, and why, and once I figured out the secret incantation required to fix it, everything seems just peachie.

The problem was caused yesterday afternoon, when I found a disc sent to me by an old friend (someone I haven’t heard from in a while and am frankly worried about…if anyone knows the status of Dr. Randy Spurlock, please drop me a note). It was an audio CD that never played properly, and when I tripped across it yesterday, I thought I’d see if I could recover anything from it. I used a few different recovery apps on it (including the wonderful ISO Buster), and allowed it to run for hours to see if anything could be salvaged. Two of the tracks were recovered (although I haven’t had the time to listen to them yet, so I don’t know what condition they are in), and I shut the apps down and forgot all about it.
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