Flashes of Panic

We sent out fifty or sixty “evaluation” copies of a particular CD recently. Five or six recipients have contacted us to say the disks wouldn’t mount in their systems, but to date only one has sent the “faulty” disk back.

Both the “faulty” disk, and a control picked up from the stock room, mount without complaint on nearly every system in our office. The exception is my Mac—the machine on which this particular title was mastered, mind you—which thinks for a while, then spits out the disk without comment or explanation.

Just for fun, I also powered up the Firewire external CD burner, and verified that the system will mount the disks in that drive, but not in its internal drive.

So it seems likely that there’s an issue with the initial file-system blocks of the disk which only affects certain drives. And it happens that about 10% of the recipients of the evaluation copies have such drives, a significantly higher percentage than we have here in the office.

I’m trying to find out what system software/hardware the people with “faulty” copies are using, because (of course) it doesn’t occur to most people that this kind of information will be necessary in eradicating a problem. I guess we think of things as broken or not, and the idea that it could be broken to some people and not-broken to others, depending on the firmware of their internal CD-ROM drive (I’m trying to somehow eliminate the possibility that my drive is having problems) is a bit too exotic for everyday thinking.

I’d be less motivated to suss this out (preferring to kick it back to the disk authors) if I hadn’t mastered the disk myself. I want to establish that this isn’t a problem I created, even inadvertently.

Now Playing: Away from Back to Me by Kathleen Edwards