disc-based media scanning with NERO question

[Cornelius]

Is scanning a disc with NERO a good way to tell if a game will play on a given system? (PS1, PS2, XBox) It will report if a sector is good, damaged, or bad. Anyone experiment enough to find out what is still playable? If the whole disc is 'damaged' will it still play? Will a disc with 3 or 4 bad sectors play?

I've been doing this lately with games I am selling but don't have the time or desire to play. I presume it to be better than just seeing if the game will load, since that doesn't give the whole picture.

Also, does anyone know a way to check out Gamecube games? I have one with a kinda bad looking scratch (mario sunshine) that I don't know what to do with. Don't wanna play the whole game again. It loads fine, and a couple of the levels I went to load fine.

[Mr. Smashy]

I find that Nero's scandisc function is good for testing PS1 games and PS2 games. If the result comes back without error, the game should run perfectly fine (and any problems playing it are likely due to a failing optical drive on the game system). If there are read errors, you need to be a little more careful. Some games (like Katamari Damacy) will always show an error during a scan so it's sometimes good to have a 2nd copy of a game available to you for testing purposes.

[Kitsune Sniper]

Is scanning a disc with NERO a good way to tell if a game will play on a given system? (PS1, PS2, XBox) It will report if a sector is good, damaged, or bad. Anyone experiment enough to find out what is still playable? If the whole disc is 'damaged' will it still play? Will a disc with 3 or 4 bad sectors play?

I've been doing this lately with games I am selling but don't have the time or desire to play. I presume it to be better than just seeing if the game will load, since that doesn't give the whole picture.

Also, does anyone know a way to check out Gamecube games? I have one with a kinda bad looking scratch (mario sunshine) that I don't know what to do with. Don't wanna play the whole game again. It loads fine, and a couple of the levels I went to load fine.

I do this all the time. If a sector is damaged there might be skipping music (depending on the game), but if it's completely unreadable then you might as well throw the disc out.

This -does- depend on the game, though. Safedisc protected PC games have tons of errors in the inner ring on purpose but are fine otherwise.

Oh, and as you probably found out from my other topic, XBox games can't be read with Scandisc.