Hardware or Software Errors causing bad DVD Burns?

BrianW · 04-24-2006, 01:28 AM

Alright, so I have no idea to even start on this problem and the past 2 months of searching yield no info. I run slackware-current on my desktop PC with 2.8GHz P4, 1024mb memory, and a ASUS P4P800-E mobo with a Sony DRU-720A DVD+-R/RW Drive.

My problem is rather consistent and annoying. My computer now is unable to burn a DVD Movie correctly without causing a coaster to be ejected from the drive. I have my computer set to run updatedb every 6 hours and I noticed that when I was last burning a dvd and the growisofs progress ouput was near 90% finished and updatedb ran, the movie played fine until that point and then began to freeze. Although, even with my system at fully idle, it will still cause coasters to be burnt and it does not matter on the DVD brand I happen to attempt to burn to.

Also, when I use growisofs and select a speed to be used (ie growisofs -speed=1), it never burns at the specified speed. It sometimes will burn at 8x. 4x, or 2x but never 1x if I specify it.

I guess I'm mainly trying to find out if there are any tests I can run to trace down what the problem is to hardware or maybe software based.

Thanks for the time,
Brian

dannystaple · 04-24-2006, 05:59 PM

Ok - is there any output log produced from your run of growisofs? Or has it left logs in /var/log/messages detailing the problem?

updatedb and other things can give the drives on the bus a good thrashing. Is the Sony drive internal or external? Also have you enabled any kind of burn-proofing? That may prevent it suffering from buffer-underrun, which may be exactly what you are experiencing. Although that does not explain the 1x problem.

I am aware that such a flag can be set in both k3b, and the gnome equivalent, and have never had trouble burning a CD or DVD with those. Although I am aware that you are probably looking for a command line solution, maybe you ought to try one of those, and see if you can perform your burn from them.

Are you mastering an image first then burning it, or trying to burn straight from source files?

Cheers,
Danny

BrianW · 04-25-2006, 11:41 AM

Ok, some further specs.
I have 2 120GB IDE drives connected on the same cable and my dvd+-R burner (internal IDE) is on its own seperate cable. From my understanding on searching, I've found that DVD's do not have a burn-proof / burnfree option to burn them.

The output from growisofs is as follows:

Code:

bash-3.1$ growisofs -speed=1 -Z /dev/hdd -dvd-video dvd
Executing 'mkisofs -dvd-video dvd | builtin_dd of=/dev/hdd obs=32k seek=0'
  0.22% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:19:29 2006
  0.45% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:23:13 2006
  0.67% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:21:58 2006
/dev/hdd: "Current Write Speed" is 4.1x1385KBps.
  0.89% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 11:00:40 2006
  1.11% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:55:25 2006
  1.33% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:50:41 2006
  1.56% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:48:22 2006
  1.78% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:46:38 2006
  2.00% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:45:16 2006
  2.22% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:44:12 2006
  2.45% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:43:18 2006
  2.67% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:42:34 2006
  2.89% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:41:57 2006
  3.11% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:40:53 2006
  3.34% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:40:27 2006
  3.56% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:40:05 2006
snipped center chunk to save some space since its completely the same through
 98.11% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:33:41 2006
 98.33% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:33:41 2006
 98.55% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:33:41 2006
 98.77% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:33:41 2006
 99.00% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:33:40 2006
 99.22% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:33:40 2006
 99.44% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:33:40 2006
 99.66% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:33:40 2006
 99.89% done, estimate finish Tue Apr 25 10:33:40 2006
Total translation table size: 0
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 0
Total directory bytes: 4096
Path table size(bytes): 42
Max brk space used 42000
2247571 extents written (4389 MB)
builtin_dd: 2247584*2KB out @ average 3.9x1385KBps
/dev/hdd: flushing cache
/dev/hdd: updating RMA
/dev/hdd: closing disc

There is no error message in dmesg or /var/log/messages or any other log I happen to check.

As for k3b, I have tried burning from there also a few times. I had it create the image first and burn it later from K3B and also from the command line but it gave me the same issues as well.

As for the burning at incorrect speed, I know that in some cases that if the DVD media is not detected correctly by the burner, it is unable to burn at the stated speed. However though, using the same media before that would burn at the specified speed, it later would not burn correctly causing my to have no clue what is happening.

Thanks for the time and help.
-Brian

dannystaple · 04-26-2006, 06:43 AM

Hmm - what about data DVD's, do you have no problems there? Have you tried burning a nice large disk full, and then using a verification flag on it to make sure you got what you expected?