Indeed, the discs should be error free, but my experience is that they're not. I've now cranked through about 1/3 of the stack, using cygwin's cp, and I'm getting (apparently) flawless results, albeit not terribly fast (~30 minutes to read a full disc). If I try using xcopy or drag-and-drop from the GUI, I get all kinds of errors. My guess is that cygwin is just doing things the simple-but-dumb way, which works fine, but the Microsoft tools are trying to be "smarter" and, thus, are failing.

At least my Plextor drive seems to be working consistently, unlike the Pioneer drive in my Mac or the whatever cheap drive in my wife's Dell laptop.

Is there an easy way to look at a burned DVD and tell what brand it is? They've got pre-printed labels slapped on the top, and I'd rather not tear them off. As such, there's no easy way to see a brand name. There's a code on the inner clear plastic part that says "3D524A308404GH". And, on the inner part of the disc surface, there are two other codes: "0305" on one side and "GH000073" on the other side. The disk surface is blue/blue-grey.