Program that analyzes the data integrity of a CD?
 

It might be either the CD-Rs or my burner - or both - but as often as not Nero's data verification fails due to 'bad sectors.' I currently use EAC's Test Selected Tracks after the burn to see what it can find in terms of errors... my question is is there a program designed to look at a CD and test its data? I don't know, maybe EAC is really all I need, but I figured I'd ask in case somebody has a better solution.

Also, what the hell causes 'bad sectors' anyway? And does it mean the disc is completely flawed?

I could use the same thing. I've got a disc (POTC: At World's End) that is completely scratch-free, but my drive has a hell of a time trying to read it. I once tried to rip that disc, and it took over an hour.

to test or copy files from cd or dvd try this:

BadCopy Pro or CDRoller

Are you referring to data discs or audio discs? AFAIK IsoBuster can do surface scanning for data discs and identify the files which lie on bad sectors. Not sure if this features also works for audio discs (especially since CDDA lack the additional EDC/ECC code).

Both actually. But audio discs more so right now since I'm getting a string of bad copies. Man it pisses me off when I tell Nero to shut down after completion but due to failure it doesn't.
IsoBuster looks to be what I was looking for. If I perform a scan and it says everything is clean, does that mean I should ignore Nero's failed data verification?

For audio discs, you can't do much other then EAC test rip. They lack the error correction that data discs have, so theres no other option.

For data discs, Nero CD-DVD speed can analyze discs from sector to sector, checking for integrity.

No, what Nero and IsoBuster do is very different.

When Nero writes data to an optical media it has the source data at hand, and later (after writing) it compares this source data with the data it extracts from the optical media. If the source and extracted data differ then Nero gives an error.

IsoBuster can't do this, because it simply has not the original source data to verify against. It can only extract each sector and check if the data part of the sector fits with the included EDC/ECC fields. As already said, the CDDA has virtually no error detection and correction code at this media level, so IsoBuster might not detect bad media errors. What I can do however is to check C1 and C2 state of the drive, but I'm only guessing here.

The problem is even more complicated with audio discs if you take the read and write offset into consideration. Probably the audio data was written correctly but Nero fails to detect the right write/read offset combination to get an in-sync extraction. And so the comparison between source data and written data fails (because 0-samples still affect CRCs and other hash types).

There is this Windows-tool KProbe that works with Lite-On devices (I don't know if that only applies to the PI/PO extraction), but you might want to try that to do an C1/C2 scan of the media. If the drive gives correct C1/C2 information you should be a pretty good impression of the media state by looking at the final graph which KProbe generates from the scanning.

Additional Spam:
That's true, but there still is CIRC.

Well DUDES I did a little experiment and it seems to have succeeded. I used IsoBuster to extract the image (.bin) and cue sheet, then opened the .cue in Nero and burned that. For some reason it burned extremely quick with successful verification. I don't know how this is different from doing everything in Nero, since that extracts an image file too and burns that, but despite the extra step in IsoBuster this method seems much more efficient and stable.

Funny thing.

So you have like this setup:
1) mastering audio data in Nero
2) create an image with the Nero image recorder
3) mount image with dtools
4) extract image+cue with isobuster
5) burn image with nero with verification

I might have a better idea. Do steps 1) and 2) in Nero and then use the popular ImgBurn application to do the rest.

Close yeah, except it's just steps 4 and 5. Dtools isn't even a part of it. My drive is 24x (less even) and Nero burns the cue sheet roughly in one minute! I don't understand it, but it's been working flawlessly so far.

You shouldn't burn your discs with such high speed. Writing quality is the best when choosing a low write speed which is covered by the write strategy table in the media ATIP. I think ImgBurn should tell you what strategies are available for your media.