I think my DVD drive is failing: it's increasingly failing to burn discs properly burn discs, and it's often slow to respond to the eject button. I'd rather not assume it needs replacement and get rid of it. Is there any program that can analyze it and tell me if anything's wrong with it?

this help may help you
http://freecode.com/projects/cdck
another option is to burn a disc and compare md5 checksums of the cd and the files on the hard disk

To simply see if a drive can be read, you can use dd(1). This will read in the contents of the CDROM and will ignore/discard the data (note that the CDROM device may have another name on your system):

from this link
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...tool-for-linux

what you are searching for is benchmarking software for Linux and this is what I searched for in Google" using the the following keywords "linux cd-rom benchmark"
good luck

Thank you. Hmm...cdck (which I used a long time ago and had forgotten about) and dd seem to be analyzing the disc in the drive rather than analyzing the drive, so I'll try this Inquisitor program.

Software that will burn then analyse the burnt CD/DVD can help figure out if the CD/DVD burning and reading lasers and OK or not (BTW, you'll need to burn at least one CD and one DVD as they have different writing and reading lasers). IMO its easiest to just use a normal burning program and verify the data after the burn.

That wont help you find out if the eject machanism is bad or not.

IMO with CD/DVD burners being avaible for $25 US or less is easier to replace drives with any issues rather than spending time trying to find testing/benchmarking software (which wont really do what you want anyway).

Burn a disk and then use 'cmp' to compare the iso to the burned image. It should say 'EOF on dvd.iso', which means that everything was identical (except for padding on the burned image).

Drives aren't expensive. If you think it might be failing, replace the damm thing.

Hold on. The OP asked if the burner was failing, which implies an intermittent failure, so tests of specific burns may not reveal a problem, which is unreliability. That involves probability analysis.

OP, how often are your burns failing? Are you doing/using anything diiferent comparing successful and unsucessful burns?

Sundial hit the nail on the head.

I would say every other burn fails. I know Sundial was right that drives are cheap, but if I made this post in the first place, that suggests I can't necessarily run out and replace parts on suspicion of failure. Times are hard.

Have you tried simply slowing down the burn speed?

1. As another suggested, slow down burn speeds.

2. Examine your discs. Are some dirty/smudged/stored in sunlight/damaged? Could that explain your failure rates?

3. When did you start getting such a high failure rate? What changed immediately before then (Girlfriend dump vacuum lint into computer as a protest of your time wasting? You dropped the computer? You got new burner software?)?

4. Are you doing something else with the computer while burning that you weren't doing before? That could lead to buffer under runs and such. Compare what your computer is running/doing during successful burns as opposed to failures.

5. There are cleaning discs out there. Try one.

If you want to "be sure" your drive is failing, hit it with a hammer. =) Couldn't resist. But, seriously, just replace it. DVD drives don't cost enough to spend a lot of time and anguish on.