# Cannot burn discs for over FOUR years [UNRESOLVED]

## kitsunenokenja

EDIT: Closing the thread. I returned the DVD drive and got my money back. Nobody has the slightest idea what to do to fix it.

Yep I've had this problem unresolved for over four years and I'm finally sick of it. I can't burn CDs properly. I've always had permissions problems and I just resort to using root all the time; there is a guide on the docs section of gentoo.org about setting up non-root burning and I think I have everything done that's listed there. My user is in the cdrom and cdrw groups and once I even tried using +s on /usr/bin/cdrecord but I think that caused issues for some reason. Recently though when I did a burn as root, I noticed the hardware manufacturer info from my Philips drive was coming back corrupted so I suspect the drive is basically dead for burning capabilities now. I haven't been able to burn ANYTHING in so long that I'm probably right to assume it can't burn anymore. It can still read though...

Recently I bought a new Sony DVD-RW and I was able to burn a CD-R as root just fine. I tried to burn a DVD-R last night and it died instantly with an I/O error. (I'm at work so I will have to go home later and post the error message I got.) By the way, that burn was done as root. What I had done preceding the DVD burn was I just recompiled gnomebaker with the dvdr USE flag on which pulled in the dvd+rw-tools package. Now I have a nice 4.7GB coaster to put on my CD-R coaster stack.

I don't understand why I have so many issues with burning. First I would really really like to resolve the DVD-R issue, then I will deal with the non-root permissions problem. I'd prefer to get functionality working first while I'm within the window of being able to return the hardware in case it's faulty.

Again I'm not at home so information about my system setup will be posted later today. Any help would really be appreciated!!

----------

## NeddySeagoon

DarkMorph,

Lets start at the very beginning with checking over your kernel setup.

What kernel (uname -a) are you using ?

What does lspci say your hardware is?

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## kitsunenokenja

All right I'm back. Here's some info.

System-related info:

```

$ uname -a

Linux kim 2.6.20-gentoo-r6 #1 PREEMPT Tue Apr 24 15:16:25 EDT 2007 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.53GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

```

```

$ /usr/sbin/lspci | grep IDE

00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DB (ICH4) IDE Controller (rev 02)

```

```

# lshw | less

           *-ide:1

                description: IDE Channel 1

                physical id: 1

                bus info: ide@1

                logical name: ide1

                clock: 33MHz

              *-cdrom:0

                   description: DVD-RAM writer

                   product: SONY DVD RW DRU-840A

                   physical id: 0

                   bus info: ide@1.0

                   logical name: /dev/hdc

                   version: SS01

                   capabilities: packet atapi cdrom removable nonmagnetic dma lba iordy audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram

                   configuration: status=nodisc

```

Software info:

```

# emerge -pv cdrtools dvd+rw-tools gnomebaker

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!

[ebuild   R   ] app-cdr/cdrtools-2.01.01_alpha34  USE="unicode" 0 kB 

[ebuild   R   ] app-cdr/dvd+rw-tools-7.0  0 kB 

[ebuild   R   ] app-cdr/gnomebaker-0.6.2  USE="dvdr flac libnotify mp3 nls vorbis -debug" 0 kB 

Total: 3 packages (3 reinstalls), Size of downloads: 0 kB

```

Perms-related info:

```

# ls -lh /usr/bin/cdrecord            

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 229K Dec 30 19:33 /usr/bin/cdrecord

```

```

# grep foxntd /etc/group

wheel::10:root,foxntd

audio::18:foxntd

cdrom::19:foxntd,haldaemon

video::27:root,foxntd

games::35:foxntd

cdrw::80:foxntd,haldaemon

users::100:games,foxntd

plugdev:x:443:haldaemon,foxntd

```

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## hefe

You say:

 *Quote:*   

> Recently though when I did a burn as root, I noticed the hardware manufacturer info from my Philips drive was coming back corrupted so I suspect the drive is basically dead for burning capabilities now.

 

Corrupted drive info may be caused by a broken IDE-cable. Have you replaced the IDE-Cable by a new one, preferably by an 80 wire ribbon cable... I have often seen corrupted drive info in BIOS autodetection messages which most were caused by bad IDE-cables.

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## kitsunenokenja

 *hefe wrote:*   

> You say:
> 
>  *Quote:*   Recently though when I did a burn as root, I noticed the hardware manufacturer info from my Philips drive was coming back corrupted so I suspect the drive is basically dead for burning capabilities now. 
> 
> Corrupted drive info may be caused by a broken IDE-cable. Have you replaced the IDE-Cable by a new one, preferably by an 80 wire ribbon cable... I have often seen corrupted drive info in BIOS autodetection messages which most were caused by bad IDE-cables.

 

No I haven't replaced it but I have no other issues in that department. BIOS sees the devices just fine, etc. If the cable is bad, how is it possible I've been using it for CD-ROMs and the CD-R I made with the new drive?  :Confused: 

By the way here is what the output was when the DVD-R failed:

```

Executing 'mkisofs -gui -V Test Disc -iso-level 3 -l -r -hide-rr-moved -J -joliet-long -graft-points --path-list /tmp/GnomeBaker-root/gnomebaker-7CH85T | builtin_dd of=/dev/hdc obs=32k seek=0'

/dev/hdc: "Current Write Speed" is 18.4x1352KBps.

:-[ WRITE@LBA=20h failed with SK=4h/ASC=08h/ACQ=03h]: Input/output error

:-( write failed: Input/output error

/dev/hdc: flushing cache

/dev/hdc: updating RMA

/dev/hdc: closing disc

```

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## NeddySeagoon

DarkMorph,

Check your kernel Hard Drive setup is like this

Fix it if its not, boot into your new kernel and check the timestamp in 

```
uname -a
```

just to be sure.

Your kernel is a bit long in the tooth but it should still work.

Your burner will either be /dev/cdrom or /dev/hd... 

The first should be a symlink to the second.

----------

## kitsunenokenja

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> DarkMorph,
> 
> Check your kernel Hard Drive setup is like this
> 
> Fix it if its not, boot into your new kernel and check the timestamp in 
> ...

 

My kernel happens to have those options in the link you gave me, exactly, with nothing else. All built-in, no modules. And yes my drive is /dev/cdrom -> /dev/hdc.

EDIT: Did another test. This time, I bypassed gnomebaker and just ran a command as root. (I changed the file names, no big deal.)

```

# growisofs -dvd-compat -speed=2 -Z /dev/cdrom -R -J -pad ./test1.mkv ./test2.mkv 

Executing 'mkisofs -R -J -pad ./test1.mkv ./test2.mkv | builtin_dd of=/dev/cdrom obs=32k seek=0'

Using TEST000.MKV;1 for  /test2.mkv (test1.mkv)

  0.70% done, estimate finish Mon Feb 11 20:50:23 2008

  1.40% done, estimate finish Mon Feb 11 20:49:11 2008

  2.09% done, estimate finish Mon Feb 11 20:48:47 2008

/dev/cdrom: "Current Write Speed" is 4.1x1352KBps.

:-[ WRITE@LBA=20h failed with SK=4h/ASC=08h/ACQ=03h]: Input/output error

:-( write failed: Input/output error

/dev/cdrom: flushing cache

/dev/cdrom: updating RMA

/dev/cdrom: closing disc

```

----------

## StarDragon

DarkMorph,

The only thing I can think of to fix your problem is to check your BIOS bridge, what do you get from lspci? It could be an issue with your mother board.

----------

## kitsunenokenja

 *StarDragon wrote:*   

> DarkMorph,
> 
> The only thing I can think of to fix your problem is to check your BIOS bridge, what do you get from lspci? It could be an issue with your mother board.

 

```

$ /usr/sbin/lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation E7205 Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)

00:00.1 Class ff00: Intel Corporation E7505/E7205 Series RAS Controller (rev 03)

00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation E7505/E7205 PCI-to-AGP Bridge (rev 03)

00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)

00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)

00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)

00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)

00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 82)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)

00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DB (ICH4) IDE Controller (rev 02)

00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 02)

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV28 [GeForce4 Ti 4200 AGP 8x] (rev a1)

02:01.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 07)

02:01.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs SB Live! Game Port (rev 07)

02:03.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB22/A IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)

02:04.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3112 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)

02:05.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5702X Gigabit Ethernet (rev 02)

```

I have an Asus P4G8X Deluxe. Only issue I have with it is that it does not stop supplying power to itself after shut down and I have to flip the power switch on the PSU. It's annoying but at least the desktop is in a spot where I can access it easily. I'm on BIOS rev 1006 which should be stable unlike 1004 Beta which I used for two years. I will check for a BIOS flash shortly (EDIT: The only new one is 1007.02 which is beta. 1006 is latest stable.) You may notice I have a SATA RAID controller onboard. I don't use it; all four of my devices are parallel IDE.

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## NeddySeagoon

DarkMorph,

As your kernel is ok and writing started ok, is your media matched to your drive ?

e.g. a 2x drive will not normally write properly on faster media without a firmware upgrade.

It will still only write at 2x but the upgrade provides the ability to handle the faster media correctly.

----------

## depontius

Just out of curiosity, are you running "packet write" with your drive?  I used the packet write stuff for years when I had a CD-RW drive, though I didn't really do much with CD-RW disks.  It was available and it didn't hurt.  Then when I first plugged in a DVD writer, I had all sorts of problems.  First I blamed the drive, and even RMA-ed it, and the replacement had the same problems.  Then I took the drive out and borrowed a different drive from a friend, and was able to write with it, but the eject functions didn't work right.  At this point I was blaming the motherboard, or some sort of motherboard/DVD interaction.  So I bought a new DVD writer - this time an SATA model, and found the same symptoms as the original DVD writer.

Somehow something steered me toward the packet write.  I turned off that initscript, and everything just worked.  Now I leave it off, unless I actually need to use a CDRW in packet mode.

----------

## kitsunenokenja

I don't know what packet write might be, and if I have it I don't even know. If it's an initscript then I doubt I have it since I'd have to have done an rc-update add on it to be using it. Since I haven't heard of it, I doubt it's even installed.

Here's my drive and here's the media I bought. (Both links to circuitcity.com)

----------

## NeddySeagoon

DarkMorph,

Packet writing allows you to make a UDF file system on a CD-RW and use it like a floppy.

You add files and delete files like any other hard drive. Its provided in gentoo-sources.

Packet writing in linux does not work on CD-R media.

Its not needed on DVD+RW as thats a truly random access media. Just format it, make a UDF filesystem and off you go. DVD+RW does have some drawbacks.  The media is good for about 1000 writes in the same location and every rw mount costs a superblock write.

I have it enabled but have never seen it cause issues like you report.

----------

## kitsunenokenja

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> DarkMorph,
> 
> Packet writing allows you to make a UDF file system on a CD-RW and use it like a floppy.
> 
> You add files and delete files like any other hard drive. Its provided in gentoo-sources.
> ...

 

Nice summary. Well I don't intend on using DVD+RW or CD-RW discs in that fashion anyway, so I won't bother trying to enable this in my kernel.

As for the DVD drive, I limit the problem resolution to about 10 days, and if I still don't have DVD burning working I'm just going to return the drive and get my money back. I'm not keeping a drive I can't use. I hope someone has an idea what to do to get this thing working properly by then. My other option is to constantly scp data to my laptop and use the burner it has. How come my amd64 laptop burns CDs fine? I should try burning a DVD on the laptop just to see if that works.  :Rolling Eyes: 

----------

## kitsunenokenja

Ok I got the test results for DVD burning on my laptop. I had already compiled things with dvdr USE flag in the past knowing my laptop had DVD-RW capabilities. First trial was a flawless success!!! (Note that I ran gnomebaker as root.) Here is the output gnomebaker showed:

```

Executing 'mkisofs -gui -V Test Disc -iso-level 3 -l -r -hide-rr-moved -J -joliet-long -graft-points --path-list /tmp/GnomeBaker-root/gnomebaker-JH8G6T | builtin_dd of=/dev/hdc obs=32k seek=0'

/dev/hdc: "Current Write Speed" is 2.0x1352KBps.

Total translation table size: 0

Total rockridge attributes bytes: 401

Total directory bytes: 0

Path table size(bytes): 10

Max brk space used 0

717654 extents written (1401 MB)

/dev/hdc: flushing cache

/dev/hdc: updating RMA

/dev/hdc: closing disc

```

So why can't I burn on my desktop? What is the issue with I/O problems killing the burn process instantly? Should I try to exchange the burner for another or do I assume that for some reason, my hardware is bad only in the event I try writing ops with my disc drives?? A little over a week left before I gotta refund the Sony burner. Does anyone else have any ideas what I can do to fix it other than buy a new desktop with new mobo/CPU?  :Crying or Very sad: 

----------

## depontius

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> DarkMorph,
> 
> I have it enabled but have never seen it cause issues like you report.

 

When you say "it enabled" are you talking kernel features and software installed, or are you talking about the init script?

My problems were with the "cdrw"/"packet" init script.  (At various times it was under both names.) What was odd is that the misbehavior I had was hardware-dependent.  With my Pioneer drives, either IDE or SATA, I found that I could only access about 1/3 of the tracks on the drive, in either read or write mode.  With a borrowed Sony IDE drive, I could read and write just fine, but if I attempted a programmed eject, the tray would slide out, slide right back in, and never come out again, even manually, until I rebooted the machine.

Turning off the "cdrw"/"packet" init script, and the drives behaved perfectly.  I had installed the script in my CD-RW days.

I've never tried "UDF mode" on a DVD+RW, just using it as a rewritable DVD+R.

----------

## NeddySeagoon

depontius,

The kernel features and the init script are installed but the pktcdvd service is not started.

All it does it to create a /dev/pktcdvd which you use to accomplish packet writing to CD-RW media after you have formatted and maked a udf file system.

```
mount -t udf -o rw /dev/pktcdvd /some/mountpoint
```

allows packet writing to the CD-RW media.

I don't use it much any more as DVD+RW media does not require packet writing to achieve the same thing.

Anther straw ...  

Does hdparm /dev/..  show that DMA is in use ?

----------

## kitsunenokenja

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Anther straw ...  
> 
> Does hdparm /dev/..  show that DMA is in use ?

 

I will have to double-check when I get back home, but I'm fairly certain that it is on. After all, if it was off, that one CD-R I made would've taken forever and I definitely would've noticed the elapsed time if DMA was off. What I'm not fairly certain about is if hdparm outputted an error among the stats. I'll post the output later, sometime in the early evening.

----------

## kitsunenokenja

```

# hdparm /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:

 IO_support    =  0 (default 16-bit)

 unmaskirq     =  0 (off)

 using_dma     =  1 (on)

 keepsettings  =  0 (off)

 readonly      =  0 (off)

 readahead     = 256 (on)

 HDIO_GETGEO failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

```

I was right, DMA is on. I suppose the last error is normal since a DVD drive doesn't have geometry like a hard disk would. Also:

```

# hdparm -I /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:

ATAPI CD-ROM, with removable media

        Model Number:       SONY    DVD RW DRU-840A                 

        Serial Number:      

        Firmware Revision:  SS01    

Standards:

        Supported: CD-ROM ATAPI-3 -4 -5 -6 -7 

Configuration:

        DRQ response: 50us.

        Packet size: 12 bytes

Capabilities:

        LBA, IORDY(cannot be disabled)

        DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 *udma4 

             Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns

        PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 

             Cycle time: no flow control=383ns  IORDY flow control=120ns

```

Things don't look good; nobody has ideas now... I'm gonna end up just returning the drive huh...  :Crying or Very sad: 

Is there something in the kernel I need regarding LBA for this? I see in the original error about a write failure and LBA. Hmm...

----------

