A cyclic redundancy error message usually occurs when your CD or CD drive is trying and failing to read or copy data from a CD or DVD.

You might find the drive will whir and click away for a few minutes as it struggles to read the disk before finally give you a DVD or CD read error.

The actual error itself usually means one of four things.

1. The file itself is corrupt.
2. Or as in most cases the actual CD or DVD has a problem such as a scratch over the area you’re trying to copy from causing the problem.
3. The CD/DVD drive itself
4. Disk read speed is too high

The cyclic redundancy error or CRC as it’s is commonly known can usually be repaired one way or another.

1. Corrupt File – Perhaps the hardest type of cyclic redundancy error to fix is a corrupt file, this can happen if the file was not copied properly onto the disk, caused either by a CD write problem, the writing process is terminated or the file was corrupt to begin with.
2. Disk Scratches – The most common reason for a cyclic redundancy error is a disk with a surface scratch preventing the CD or DVD drives laser from being able to see through the surface of the disk causing a DVD or CD read error, different drives seem to offer different tolerances when it comes to scratches on disk, and you might find one drive may read the disk and another may not.

   Personally I’ve found newer drives to be less tolerant to scratches whereas older and slower drives seem to be more resilient to this.

   If you look at the disk and find that it does have scratches there are a number of ways to actually make the scratch or scratches smaller which may then allow the drives laser to see through the scratch and read the disks data.

3. Dirt and Dust – Like all electronic components CD & DVD drives do attract dust as it’s drawn into the computer via any fans. Any dust getting onto the drives laser can easily cause a cyclic redundancy error so it’s worth cleaning the drive every so often with a standard DVD player cleaning disk.
4. Read Speed too High – As the speed of drives has got faster and faster drives have become less tolerant to even the smallest of scratches in many cases, if possible it might be worth lowering the read speed of the drive when encountering any cyclic redundancy errors .

computer adviser cyclic redundancy error article