Argh! Any cluez?
 

I had my one of my HDDs die over the weekend, and lost all of my CDIs...

I know we have all talked about it before, but does anyone have a reliable way to burn a copy?

Preferably, WITHOUT converting to CDI again, and burn out... I thought about trying CDcopy... not sure... any clues???

I know this is hindsight and we all know "Hindsight is 20/20", but you ought to do what I do... I have a series of CD-ROMs that I have archived my discs to. Each disc has between 1 to 5 compressed .CDI files on it. I've got 10 discs so far and three or four let to burn. This way, If I need to reburn one, I just unpack it off the disc and burn it. It's much easier than trying to figure out how to copy a copy when the time comes.

I know this doesn't help you much now, but keep it in mind for the future...

BTW, what *I* would do is use Disc Juggler to dump it to another .CDI and then burn the CDI, but you asked for other methods besides this, so -- nevermind.... :)

an directcopy from nero works also to copy an backup from an backup!

Huhm... I've yet to try Nero on it.. I tried cloneCD, ECDC and Dj without avail...

Wayne.. I compressed my CDIs as well and put "some" of them on CDs... Problem is this... I can only fit one MAYBE two on a CD. I am using WinACE.. What the heck are you using to get THAT kind of compression??

Another problem with that, is that it takes like 20 minutes to compress one CDI file... Not to mention the de-compression of the CDI...

If you have some magic compression util, I would die to know! I thought ACEed files were the tightest... huhmph.

:P

Notice I said "one to five files on each disc". Many I got one or two on the disc, but a couple I got more. I believe these were very small, dummied games.

Here's the lineup:
1. Marvel vs Capcom & Soul Caliber
2. Daytona USA
3. Crazy Taxi, Wacky Racer, Virtua Tennis
4. Dead Or Alive 2, Nester
5. Fire Pro Wrestling, Namco Museum
6. Stunt GP, Zusar Vasar
7. NFL Quarterback Club 2001, Unreal Tournament
8. 18 Wheeler (jap), Atari Aniversary Edition, Toy Racers
9. Jeremy McGrath Supercross 2000, NBA 2K1
10. STetris (Jap), Surf Rocket Racer, Test Drive Le Mans, WWF Royal Rumble

OK, so far I've gotten a max of 4 per disc, not 5. I still have more to go too, just haven't burned them yet (got tired of archiving).

Normally, you achive good to brilliant compression ratios when acrhiving CDI images. One game I archived shrunk from 680MB to 120MB using FAST compression in Winzip. CloneCD images compress well as well. But some games won't compress well - just the way it goes..

Iv'e used CloneCD to backup some DC titles - BUT as my writer doesn't do a full RAW write there is a small problem: the games load, but on some there's a 2-second pause just before after the SEGA logo comes up. Other than that they load perfect.

I have managed to use Disc Juggler to backup self-boot DC titltes - with great success (even though my writer won't do full RAW write). However, you have to make sure you're using the latest and greatest versio of Disc Juggler, as previous version couldn't burn anything on the same writer (dreaded buffer underrruns as soon as the first audio track is written).

Hope this helps. Best of luck :-)

when you have an cdi which is full of "real" files, you dont have a chance to make an zip fom 700 to 120 MB, but if there are an great dummy File, whitch is an emty file, the zip could go to very small.

Thanks for the tips... I have heard of that "2 second gap" before, and there is a way to remove that... I found it at cdrom-guide... You might want to do a quick search there.. it is a simple step to eliminate that gap...

Yea.. I think I will just ACE every single CDI.. (yawn)... A 700 MB CDI will compress to about 400-500 for me... Oh well... lol

This may be way off the subject sixdsix but I wanted to let you know how I eliminated data loss off my hard drive. I bought 2 identical hard drives and a RAID controller. To make a long story short one of the drives is a backup copy. Everything that is saved is saved twice. If one of the drives crap out, I always have an exact duplicate. It’s a bit pricey, but it’s saved my cdi’s, cracks, patches, keygen’s, and my ass twice already. Hey, you could get real fancy and get 4 hard drives and have a backup and save data at twice the speed! Yeah…only if money grew on trees instead of these sticky green leaves.

It's all about RAID3