MY kit is a bit long in the tooth; NEC CD-RW NR-7900A
Using the write check after burning an ISO image to CD-RW gives a failed burn error 100% of the time although the OS seems to install fine from the image. Could this be on account of an old burner and k3b mismatch? I need a software that can also erase and I only know of k3b ( OS is PCLINUX MiniMe). Suggestions / comments appreciated.

One thing that could cause this problem is burning at the wrong speed. The CD-RW drive has a range of speeds that it will burn at. The burn can fail by being either too fast or too slow.

The same holds true for your CD-RW media. It too has a burn speed range and can fail either by burning too fast or too slow.

So check your CD-RW drive specs and your CD-RW media specs and make sure that the burn speed you set in k3b is within the range of both your CD-RW drive and your CD-RW media.

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Steve Stites

I have just replaced all my NEC PATA drives with NEC Sata drives. The difference: 100% failure rate versus 0%. This must be a kernel or a wodim issue and it has been hunting me for at least a year. One kernel will fix it, the next update will break it again. 2.6.24 and 25 are worse than ever, in fact. It used to be that only the checksum would fail but the cd or dvd would be OK.This time the iso does not even get burned properly. Changing burning speed does not work and neither does using different media or a different burning program (brasero, gnomebaker). Check the output of dmesg, it is almost bound to show optical drive related errors.

Edit: I believe that your PCLinux is using 2.6.22. Expect more fun when you upgrade to a more recent kernel.

The verification is broken in post .23 kernels.

Thanks for the educational replies. I thought my kit was going south but this seems like a kernel thing! CentOS and Debian stable are still on 2.6.18 kernel so might be OK to try. I hand out free Linux OSs at a PC club to newbies so even burning ISOs in WinXP might be savy for a short term fix if using an older kernel is not the way to go.

Centos5.2 is still working fine here. My F8 box is ok with the .23 but gives a Failed to find tracks to verify on anything newer.