I am a total noob so bear with me...I recently upgraded my machine, including a dvd burner. I formatted and reinstalled Mandriva 2008, everything is working great, except for my burner. It reads fine, and I can copy a cd with it, so it has to be configured right, but when i try to burn an .iso image to it in K3B, it always comes up immediately with an error saying that cdrecord has no permission to access the device. What does that mean, do I have to change something somewhere?

The directory where the iso file is stored should at least have read permissions for other users.
Check the permissions on the directory and the file that you want to burn.

I have the permissions on the directory and the file set to where everyone can read or write to it, as well as that entire drive. I used a command from a konsole called chmod which I guess sets set k3b to run as su...now i get an unknown error 254 and it tells me to try writing in TAO mode...then the error says there is a possible buffer underrun occured so choose a lower speed...so I set the speed to the lowest available (16x) and I still get the error, which makes no sense because when I do a diskcopy I can watch the burner write at about 40x speed...this is driving me nuts!

The odd thing is that just out of curiousity I plugged in my old 8x cd burner, and it seems to be burning just fine! So what gives with the brand new out of the box dvd burner?

Maybe the new drive is toast? Seems kinda strange. What make/model is it? I only use Lite ON, and have never had a problem.

IGF

Its a Lite on too, brand new...it works doing a copy of a disc...thats whats weird, it just doesn't want to write files from the hdd, but the old one does...i wonder if I try a different distro like Fedora if maybe it would work easier, cause I'm not going back to XP...but it seems like a lot of people have issues with burners in linux...guess nothings perfect.

Unless there is some very weird setting in Mandriva that I'm not aware of, I couldn't imagine a distro switch changing this, but I guess anything is possible.

IGF

Hi,
Where do you get the information that a lot of people have issues with burners in Linux?

Instead of completely switching off from the distro it would be better if you could get hold of some live cd or dvd and give it a try. It would give you a nice idea what problem is. Is it the burner that is problem or the distro that you are using.

I actually have it working now, but I have no idea why, it just started out of the blue. As far as where did I read about a lot of people having burner issues in linux I just googled it and read some forums.

Hi,

Most problems can be because the user doesn't have permissions or assigned to the proper group(s). That is not a problem with Linux but a problem for the local user not knowing how or why to setup permissions. Sure it's easier to blame something or someone else instead of actually accepting responsibilities for errors or problems.