I have a large number of DVDs to test before deciding whether they are worth selling or resurfacing. I would rather not watch or inspect every disc manually; I want a tool that can read each disc, detect unreadable areas or read errors, and report which discs are faulty. Is this practical on Linux, possibly with multiple optical drives, and are there reliable command-line or graphical tools for the job?
3 Answers
The Linux optical-drive documentation is a good place to check what your hardware supports. There are also command-line utilities that can query a drive and perform basic checks, although results can vary depending on the drive and the condition of the disc.
K3b can be useful for this. Try creating a raw image of each disc and enable the option to delete the image afterward. If the disc has unreadable areas, the process should report an error, stall, or stop. This worked reasonably well for testing assorted game, movie, and music discs.
The exact meaning of “bulk testing” matters here. If you mean testing several DVDs simultaneously, you’ll need multiple optical drives and a script or automation tool to manage them. Linux can handle that, but the setup is more involved than testing one disc at a time.
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