# CD Burning Problems

## splice

Hi All,

  I've been experiencing bad problems burning CDs ever since I installed Gentoo. I'm sure it's not the distrib, I just lost something on the move over.

  I have a Lite-On 32x12x40x, worked fine before. I could burn at 32x no problem, the buffer never went under 93% or so, unless the load was really high. Now, when I try to burn, it's like cdrdao or cdrecord just doesn't bother to buffer. I see my buffer go down gradually all the way to 0%, and then it seems to get that it should actually read more data, and the buffer then hovers around 9%-5%-3%-0%. I have no idea why.

  The burns I create can be read back fine in my machine. However, bringing the cd to a friend's place will cause woe, as most of the time they seem to be unreadable or very hard to read (this in multiple cd drives, in a few dvd players, etc). I figure the underrun protection is coming into play too often and the gaps make the cd very hard to read.

  I'm running on kernel 2.4.19-gentoo-r7 on an AMD 1ghz, 512mb of ram. My hard drives are optimized with hdparm. The hard drive I usually burn from gets these results from hdparm:

root@frodo inbox # hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:

Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.72 seconds =177.53 MB/sec

Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.89 seconds = 33.83 MB/sec

  I'm pretty sure this is enough to drive a 32x burn  :Smile: . My burner is on a separate IDE channel, /dev/hdc. I'm using SCSI generic (of course). I tried exporting CDR_FIFOSIZE=32m, with some success; the buffer still goes down to 0%, but it seems a bit slower getting there. 

  I've tried having both SCSI cdrom and ide-cd compiled as modules, load up ide-cd and hdparm /dev/hdc, unfortunately, devfs doesn't seem to get that it should create /dev/hdc at that point. I remember in my previous setup, I was definitely using hdparm to enable some stuff on the burner, and I also dimly recally that before then I had a few problems too.

  I haven't tried burning under windows, since I don't have any burner programs installed on it and I never boot to it anyway. I might try later tonight to see if the problem is more on the hardware side, but I doubt it.

  Does anyone have any suggestions for this? I'd really like to go back to not having an empty buffer all of the time and discs I can actually bring to my friend's place.

splice

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## BonezTheGoon

I know someone posted a thread about how to specify the buffer size and that had fixed problems similar or identical to what you have described.  I will search to see if I can find this post as it might be helpful.

Regards,

BonezTheGoon

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## BonezTheGoon

Here is the thread I was thinking about.  Hope this helps!!

Regards,

BonezTheGoon

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## splice

If you refer to my post, you'll see that I already have tried that solution and that I didn't have much success with it.

splice

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## BonezTheGoon

Sorry I guess I read right over that.  Many appologies, I swear I did read your entire post!!

Regards,

BonezTheGoon

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## splice

It's all right. I just would really, really, really like to get this fixed. 15+ minutes for a burn at 32x just isn't right. I feel like I have a 8x now.

Will boot windows tonight and try the burner then. Somehow I hope that it'll crap out there too, so I can know that it's a hardware problem. Otherwise, looks like I will be stuck going to windows every time I want to burn (what, 5-10 minutes to shut down everything, save my work, restart, etc) or wait 15 minutes for a burn under linux.

I guess that's the only point I see about linux that truly pisses me off; there's problems you run into that apparently no one knows how to solve and you're just on your own. Sure, I'm technically inclined, I play with computers for a living. But spending hours researching a possible fix for a problem I didn't use to have... Well. Guess I'm getting jaded.

All technology is crap, you know.

splice

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