Hey all,

I tried to search the forums for this and didn't find any help. I'm on my lunch break at work right now, so I could only do a cursory look.

I'm using Gentoo 2005.0 AMD64. I don't think it's a Gentoo problem, though, because this also happens in Arch. I did post to the gentoo forums though and havn't had a response. Help me Obi-Wans, you're my only hope. Below is most of the post I made at forums.gentoo.org, with minor editing:

Hey all,

For the last year or so, I haven't tried burning DVDs because I wanted to get a handle on avidemux and things. I didn't want to burn a DVD until I had content I wanted to burn.

Anyway, whenever I try burning a DVD, growisofs locks my computer up. I have to power off manually, then restart my computer. Normally, I usually use guis like k3b. I'm not a cli person. Sorry, I'm just not. In K3b, the progress indicator would get to 50% once it built the dvd iso, then the light would come on, then within 10 seconds the computer locks up. The light on my drive still flashes as if it's burning something, but nothing happens. Even the buffer indicator at the bottom says "no info" as if it's not able to query or fill the buffer on the drive.

A while back, I tried arch and the same thing happened. I reinstalled 2005.0 thinking there was something funky in Arch's kernel. Still the same problem.

This time, I decided to try growisofs from konsole session and copy and paste what was happening:

OK, the copy and paste didn't work. I'll try to do this from memory. Forgive me if it's not 100% acurate to what growisofs does:

Code:


bash-2.05b# growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/scd0=k3b.iso

mkisofs | dd if=k3b.iso of=/dev/scd0
mkisofs burning at 8x (8196 kb/sec)

0/1571323904 00% ??:??
0/1571323904 00% ??:??
0/1571323904 00% ??:??
0/1571323904 00% ??:??
0/1571323904 00% ??:??
0/1571323904 00% ??:??
0/1571323904 00% ??:??
0/1571323904 00% ??:??




then it locks up

Now, a little bit about my computer and setup. My computer is currently like this:

Athlon64 3000+
512MB RAM
Abit AV8

Gentoo 2005.0 (AMD64)
2.6.11-gentoo-r7

A couple hours ago, I was scouring the posts here and was reminded this could be due to a bad cable. I swapped cables and it's still happening (in the process, I accidentally unplugged my floppy - will fix that tomorrow). Incidentally, I tried running hdparm on my burner and it gave me an error:

Code:


bash-2.05b# hdparm /dev/scd0

/dev/scd0:
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument




My portage was last synced a couple days ago. I have done this as root only. I only use root on my computer (I know, not a wise thing, I'm the only one who ever uses this computer and I know the risks). I have all the scsi emulation stuff compiled into the kernel (I also like monolithic kernel builds - few or no modules). I may try to find the homepage for dvdrtools tomorrow to checkout a cvs version.

My burner is an LG 4081B. Firmware ver 104. I found an update firmware by googling, but it's only as an exe and I left windows for good when it died a while back. I don't have a way to use the exe I downloaded. I know the burner is fine since a) I can burn CD audio just fine and b)when my windows install was working, dvd burns were just fine.

Is this a 2.6 thing? Am I forgetting any scsi options in my kernel? Any patches anyone has heard of?

Anyway, I would appreciate any help anyone can give.

Thanks,

Wackman

I'm not sure about the exact problem, but i have an idea: With the 2.6.x.x kernels you no longer need the scsi emulation to write to the IDE Drives - this could be your problem. Carefully go through the kernel configuration and remove the depriciated scsi emulation, then try it using the ide device ie -Z /dev/hdc=k3b.iso

Might not work, but worth a try

Hope this helps.

Sorry it took me so long to respond.

You were right. It was the ide-scsi that was causing a problem. I don't know why, but it was. Once I recompiled my kernel, using plain old vanila ide cd support (ATAPI), I can burn DVDs. I was able to burn my dvd iso without problem.

Now to figure out dvdauthor scripting.

I now have a new problem, but I have another post open about that.