# [SOLVED] Weird problem reading data DVDs.

## tundra

I must preface this by saying that I am not experiencing this problem on a gentoo system.  I am 100% gentoo at home, but at work I am limited to Scientific Linux.  Nonetheless, I hope that the wise minds of gentoo have some insight.

I have burned a number of data DVDs with k3b.  All contain over 3GB of data, all burned without issues, and all were verified by k3b.  However, when I try to read them I can only access literally the first 1GB of data.  I mean, it stops within a handful of kbytes of 1048576  kbytes for every disc, which can't be a coincidence!  For the rest of the files on the disc it just says "input/output error" and fails to copy them.  

My sysadmin at work is at a loss.  Can anyone point me in the right direction here?

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## 666threesixes666

get flash drives that can store all the data, setup a share on your home pc, and dyndns into it....  REDUNDANCY is my genius solution to your problem...  car stalls?  catch the bus...  bus catches fire, get on the train....  transfer the data to a net-top laptop computer, and bring it to work.

could be geometry is off on your home dvd burner, and your burner can read it but nothing else can.  could be a geometry problem on the work machine.  could be a problem with your method of mounting, bug in a library, bug in drives firmware.....  do you use gvfs to auto mount the disk?  i dont trust optical media....  get a WD mybook network drive or something similar....  check out a work laptop....  NOTHING gets between me and my data.....

md5 sum the dvd, if md5 on drive a and drive b match, then its a system problem and not a hardware problem.  there are many many many details that could be very helpful you could post.

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## tundra

Thanks for your response.  I do not want to go into too much detail here, as it is not a gentoo problem, I was just hoping someone might have seen this before and know what the problem is.  But that's cool, I'll keep digging away at it.  I now know that the discs are OK, as I can read them on a Windoze machine.  It just burns me when I have to resort to that extreme!

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## 666threesixes666

scientific linux is a redhat derivative.  personally ill say YUCK at that.  its a problem with scientific linux, and should be addressed at their forums.   redhat is hard to manage compared to gentoo.  maybe suggest gentoo to your administrator at work.  for me to convert my redhat training to other distributions only took a little bit of effort as much of it is the same, only different package management systems.  (and portage resolves dependencies like a dream compared to YUM)

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## tundra

Yeah, I wish I could get gentoo at work.  But no dice.  I did put gentoo on my work-supplied laptop (by snatching it out of receiving before the IT goons could get their hands on it), but they are clamping down on that now too.  Boo.  I really don't like Scientific, not least of all because they run an old version.  My "new" desktop has a 2.6.32 kernel, which is only 3 years old!  But I can't even blame that, because i just tried a colleague's machine and it can read the discs too, so it is just my machine that has trouble, and it wrote them!

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## tundra

In case anyone is following along at home, I solved this one.  I had vmplayer running (since I need Windoze for certain work-related things), which had access to the dvd drive.  I just disconnected the drive in vmplayer, and now it works fine.  I knew Windoze had to be to blame somehow!

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