1. If you have a lot scratches on your CD, this might cause problems for your drive & EAC. Either crc mismatches (Test & Copy !) as indicator for the bad condition of the track on that CD, or even Read & Sync errors.
Often these problems can be solved by cleaning and polishing the scratched CD. Try some mild abrasives, like Brasso, it was reported, that even polishing with toothpaste was successful.
Or you have access to a professional CD/DVD polishing machine.
If you have seen once the positive results of prof. polished discs, e.g. DVDs, and how the surface looks after polishment, then you understand, that even not so mild abrasives could be tried manually, perhaps even fine sandpaper (be careful, not rough paper like '60' or 80, it should be very fine sandpaper, like maybe 200, better 400, up to 1200 perhaps !
2. Reducing drive speed:
If you have got a checksum crc mismatch by EAC's Test & Copy, or read/sync errors, it might help with your drive, to try an extraction of those suspicious tracks with reduced optimized drive speed. You need a tool for this, e.g. the German 'CD Bremse' or Nero's tool Nero DriveSpeed , included in Nero Burning package.
Example: The Plextor PlexWriter 8/4/32 A/T seems to be able to extract best at 4x speed. There was a very scratched track, which could not be extracted at 1x (the drive hang !), and which had read errors with higher speed, e.g. 8x. But with fixed 4x speed, the track was extracted slowly, but fine !
Well, because these settings are very specific for each drive and maybe even dependent on tracks, CDs and scratches, here cannot be recommended more. You should make trials yourself, if you get problems, then your experience grows.
CD behaves weird ?
1. Try EAC's 'Detect TOC Manually'
2. Try another drive for extraction
1. Maybe after starting to extract by EAC, nothing happens, or even EAC hangs, or the PC, or you get a lot red lines very often in EAC's window reporting the extraction status. Another indicator for defect TOC (table of content) of your CD: weird negative times shown in EAC.
If your CD seems to be in a good condition without scratches, then you should try 'Detect TOC Manually' feature of EAC 0.9b4 or EAC 0.95pb3, those EAC versions offered at main page of this tutorial. Newer EAC versions don't have this feature anymore. It is helpful, if your CD isn't compliant to the red book standard (CDDA). These uncompliant CDs cause often problems e.g. in Car CD players or some DVD players (which are built on PC drives), too. Reasons to bring those uncompliant CDs back to your store !
How To make a backup of these CDs ? - e.g. you want to play the backup-CD in your car:
1. Start EAC 2. Insert CD
3. EAC -> Action -> Detect TOC Manually
4. Continue according to this Guide
2. Sometimes this doesn't help. Then you have left as last chance: Try another drive, if available, maybe your CD-writer/burner.
Example: The Toshiba DVD/CD Rom drive SD-M 1222 is not so good at extracting these defect uncompliant CDs, mostly even detecting the TOC doesn't help.
But the Plextor ( and Lite On ) drives and writers (like the old but excellent PlexWriter 8/4/32A/T model) are known, to be capable of extracting well by EAC & detect toc manually.
The drives of the sort like Toshiba SD-M 1222 (more modern drives T. 1502, 1602, 1712, 1802 have very similar firmware & properties) can e.g. extract all tracks besides the very first track, which would require then extraction by another drive like Plextor, Lite-On.
