Originally posted by: loki8481
pretty much any felt-tipped marker should be fine.
I believe this is wrong. I read that the ingredient responsible for the permanent marker smell eats away at the CD slowly. Thus, sharpies are fine (they smell different than a regular permanent marker), and regular permanent markers are bad.
Anecdotally, I've got some CDs that are 6(?) years old which all read 100% correctly when I tested them. I labeled with a sharpie.
Before I got my sharpie (hey, I'm cheap ), I labeled a few CDs with a regular permanent marker. Sure enough, in a couple years, they developed some unreadable sectors.
Use the scan feature of
dvdisaster to scan your CDs for bad sectors. Just because you can copy all the data off doesn't mean all the sectors are good. BTW, this program is also great for generating ECC files of your CDs/DVDs when you burn them so you can later recover them completely even if they have a couple bad sectors.
I'll edit this post if I can locate the book that had the info about permanent markers in it.