Hello,

I am running SLED 10 (Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10) with the Gnome desktop. I have an external USB DVD-RW drive (HP DVD640) that Suse recognizes just fine if I want to read CDs or DVDs from it. It seems to also recognize the drive with a blank dvd in it. It gets mounted as /media/hpdvd. I can drag/drop folders and files to /media/hpdvd, but I cannot figure out how to write anything to the disk. There is no "Write to CD/DVD" button. If I bring up Gnome CD/DVD Creator, it sees only my internal DVD/CD-RW drive. I have K3B installed under Gnome, and it too only sees my internal DVD/CD-RW drive.

In a nutshell, my external HP DVD640 drive is recognized for reading, but not writing. How can I get it to be recognized for writing so I can backup data onto a dvd?

Thanks.

In k3b, Settings - Configuration - Devices, there is a comment at the top of the page which reads, in part:

"If K3b is unable to detect your drive, you need to modify their permissions to give K3b write access"

Have you done that?

Thanks for the reply. No, I had not done that. What do I need to change the permissions of? Is it the /media/hpdvd folder, which I'm guessing is a link to the "real" device? Or do I need to look through the /dev folder for the actual "real" device and change its permissions?

I'm not sure where to look in the /dev folder for a usb dvd drive. I did, however, change the permissions on the /media/hpdvd folder, but there's no difference in K3B or Gnome CD/DVD Creator.

I finally got my HP DVD recorder recognized for writing. I did several things, so I'm not sure which actually worked, but I switched to a different USB port and I put a readable disc in the drive. I had a blank disk in the drive before, but I guess I had to put something useful in the drive for it to be recognized.

I'm having another problem, though. The HP drive is a double-layer DVD drive, and in K3B when I click on "Burn", I get a message that says "Found media: No media ... Please insert an empty or appendable Double Layer DVD+-R medium into drive". I have an empty single layer 4.7gb disc in the drive. Is the drive not able to burn onto a single layer disc or is there a way that I can tell K3B that I want to burn onto a single layer disc instead of a double layer?