The BIOS sees the drive and k3b too, but it says "no medium found". Several discs which can be read by a different drive in my other 'puter were also inserted and also not found. Dolphin doesn't see them either, nor does the removable media watchdog pop up.

This is a new error. Until a few days ago the drive still worked. Then I tried to install Win7 SP1 from this drive on an old hard disk in the machine -- seems I shouldn't have tried that .

Any suggestions how to proceed from here are very welcome.

Based on what you said, I'm guessing you moved drives around internally. Since the drive DID work and now it doesn't, first thing I'd check would be cables, given the hardware movement. Of course, the drive could have just given up....but timing sound suspicious.

Even the message "no medium found" does indicate that the cabling works
so far. It stems from an SCSI error code emitted by the drive and forwarded
by the kernel to the program which wants to access the medium.

The drive is probably damaged (e.g. lost its laser sight). We could watch
the data traffic between drive and a burn program by this inspection
command:
(assuming that you only have one DVD drive which then is /dev/sr0).
The messages will be shown and also caught in file /tmp/xorriso.log which
then would be interesting to see here.

If the connection to the drive is ok, we will see about 100 or 200 text
lines like
The shown numbers are hexadecimal byte values.
(Here the drive tells its name "48 4c 2d 44 54 2d 53 54" = "HL-DT-ST"
"42 44 44 56 44 52 57 20 47 47 43 2d 48 32 30 4c" = "BDDVDRW GGC-H20L".)

Error indicating replies by the drive should become visible like
Error code 2,3A,00 means "MEDIUM NOT PRESENT". (Which is true in this test.)

Be aware that Blu-ray, DVD, and CD use different lasers respectively.
It may be that DVD are not recognized any more, but CD are.

there could be dust/dirt in there.
i have "fixed" dvd drives more than once by cleaning the insides.
especially the lens.

Yes. The potential damage might be repairable if its cause is trivial
enough. Some blowing and vacuuming from all sides might help.
But when one of my Blu-ray drives lost its BD capability, nothing did
help. It still works fine with CD and DVD, but does not recognize any BD.

Okay, here comes the log. Well, attachment doesn't work, so I paste it here as code:

<edit> No it worked. Deleted the "paste". I will try cleaning the drive next, will be back later. Thanks for all input .

Attached Files

xorriso.log (6.0 KB, 28 views)

The drive simply and repeatedly states that there is no medium.
This error code means "MEDIUM NOT PRESENT TRAY CLOSED".

Command GET CONFIGURATION returns information that no profile is
current. This means that no medium related commands will work.
(In general the drive promises to support all usual DVD and CD profiles.)

This points towards my theory with the dead laser or ondoho's theory
with the dust bunnies.

Okay, we can wrap it up: I dismantled the drive and cleaned an already clean lens. No change. Conclusion: laser is deceased. RIP.

Grrr. This is most inconvenient, since the machine is a gift for my son with an already overstretched budget. He'll have to wait for an optical drive now...

Thanks for all the input you provided . I am always fascinated anew what kind of tools exist. "xorriso". Now really who would have thought anything like that exists, but then after some seconds ... .

> I am always fascinated anew what kind of tools exist. "xorriso".

The name means: X/Open on Rock Ridge enhanced ISO 9660.

Its job is normally to create ISO 9660 filesystems and to burn them onto
optical media or to store them on hard disk. Many distros use it to make
their bootable ISO images. I use it for daily incremental backups.

The SCSI log is actually a feature of libburn, which provides the
capabilities about operating optical drives.

My commiserations (Herzliches Beileid) on the deceased drive. I still
feel the pain from back 15 years, when my first Yamaha CD burner died.

Ah. Thanks for the extended information about xorriso. I read its man page but I couldn't see why one would use it as (incremental) backup tool. What are the advantages for you there or are you actually always burning your backups on CDs / DVDs?

Hi,

> I couldn't see why one would use it as (incremental) backup tool.

The man page has an example "Incremental backup of a few directory trees".

> What are the advantages for you there or are you actually always burning
> your backups on CDs / DVDs?

Yes. My daily backups go to optical media. Meanwhile mostly Blu-ray.
Depending on the directory collection which is covered, i can burn
about 150 to 300 days to one 25 GB medium. If i need a file version of a
particular day, i can mount that session and see the about 3 GB of files
as they were at that day. (Wonders of de-duplication. )

Another advantage of having an ISO 9660 driver in userspace is that i can
work around kernel shortcommings. (Linux does not wait for the tray to
be completely loaded, BSD cannot properly read files of 4 GiB or larger, ...)

Besides not knowing xorriso I gave up on the idea to do my backups on optical media. I saved my pictures to some BluRay M-disks but do the regular backups on standard magnetic drives.

Would you mind sharing the commands you use for backup and restore? Thanks in any case for this interesting twist of the thread .

Hm, yes, we are detouring this thread. Shall we start a new one ?
If so: Post a link to its URL here.
If not: Post a note that we shall go on discussing in this thread.

The new thread is here:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...76#post5915776

See you .