Last month, I shipped several hundred CDs to MusicShifter, who ripped everything to Apple Lossless and shipped me my CDs back with about 50 DVDs worth of those files. So far so good. My home Mac (circa 2001 PowerMac G4 with the Pioneer DVD-R "SuperDrive") had massive error rates. My wife's Dell (relatively new) has the flakey Bluetooth problem, discussed earlier, and seems to have heat issues with the DVD drive running too much. Now I'm doing it on my work machine, running Windows XP, and using my trusty Plextor PX-708A (DVD +/- R/RW). I'm still seeing some errors, although it's going generally better than the home machines. Questions:

- What's the fastest "copy" command to use? Cygwin's 'cp' has traditionally been quite slow, at least when doing anything over the network. Microsoft's 'xcopy' is what I'm using so far, mainly because it has a "ignore errors" flag, which is key to working around these blasted DVDs. It still takes about 29 minutes to read a whole DVD. (Windows Explorer drag-and-drop doesn't work because it can't be told to ignore errors.)

- What's the way to do this reliably? Here's some xcopy output:

Quote:
$ xcopy 'e:\' 'g:\Music-Lossless' /E /R /Y /C /G
E:\Order-000579_Files.htm
File creation error - Error performing inpage operation.

E:\Orbital\In Sides Disc 2\05 Halcyon [Live][-].m4a
File creation error - Copy Protection Error - The read failed because the sector
is encrypted.

Switching to cygwin's 'cp', I was able to get both of those files copied without error. I suppose I could just do everything with cygwin, but maybe there are other tools that the collective wisdom out here might recommend...

EDIT: It looks like cygwin's cp takes 31 minutes to read a DVD while xcopy takes 29 minutes. Neither is spectacular, so I might as well stick with cygwin since it has fewer errors. What I really want is a much faster tool, assuming my DVD drive can go that fast.