i am using mandriva 2008 and wish to write some data on my dvd rw.
For that purpose i used k3b to first fomat my dvd rw and then when i tried writing data on the same dvd rw so i inserted the dvd rw in my dvd drive and it autoplayed and showed a dialouge box showing that there is a blank dvd in the drive and gave me the option of writing data on dvd using k3b and so i used the option but after selecting data in k3b and starting to write,
the process started it wrote the image of the data but was not able to write data on dvd rw!!said:error writing data.
Now can someone tell me what may be the problem!! alongwith some nice dvd burning software for mandriva 2008 which are bugfree and easy to handel/use!!

K3b is the answer. The pop up you are talking about I find very irritating. I'm using Mandiva 2007, I just click cancel on that pop up. One of these days I need to figure out how to kill the pop up.

Now for your DVD writing issues. You need to supply some more information. Were you doing a 'data project'? What type of media were you using? What options? Post the entire error you get.

K3b is rock solid. It uses command line binary files to do its work. Most issues will turn out to be either user error, or bad media, or hardware.

K3b is an application that you'll find on many distributions so it may not be a Mandriva specific issue. It could be however: I have not trouble using K3b from Fedora but doing so from Ubuntu makes my PATA writer bomb out (???). I haven't figured out whether it's the version of K3b or the way it interacts with the system.

Anyway, there are a number of things that you can do to troubleshoot. First of all, launch K3b from the terminal by typing k3b. This should print some information to the terminal; check whether it contains any error messages, for example whether your writer was detected at all and whether it wasn't disabled again because om some error. You should also launch it as root to see whether that makes a difference. Type su - into the terminal, then k3b. Check the output.

There are alternatives, by the way. You could also uses gnomebaker or brasero. But if your problem is hardware related, those won't be any more helpful than k3b.

All K3B does is to supply a front end to scripts, cdrecord being one of them. Very good product, though. The developers deserve a pat on the back.

You don't need a 'gui' to do what you want, just knowing what commands are available. Did you read the man page?

man cdrecord

Regards

OK, but there is more to it. K3b is based on an SCSI system and I blame many of today's issues on the introduction of the libata driver. K3b used to be fine emulating PATA drives as SCSI devices; but now that the libata driver is already doing that, K3b and the whole underlying technology may simply get confused in some instances.