I'm trying to archive data to blu ray discs as an added archive/backup. These are mostly photos and videos of the family and I don't want to risk losing them, especially the ones of our kids.

K3b version 2.02 on Ubuntu 11.10
Drive is a Lite-on IHBS112-04

I've never burned a blu ray disc in linux without errors going back to when I built this system back in December. I think I had some problem media because I was getting "the LUN appears to be stuck writing" errors in the debug output so I picked up some Kodak media. This looks good and I have some Verbatim on the way from newegg. Unfortunately while the new media works better (I no longer get the lun stuck writing errors, I'm getting this new error. k3b nearly finishes writing and at the very end (99%) says:

However, when I open the debug file I don't see an error (debug file attached as multiple parts).

Also, dvdisaster reads the disc and all sectors come back green, and doing a file comparison of the contents with

it comes back without finding any errors.

I've attached a picture of the k3b dialog box and I've broken the debug file into six parts because it is too big for LQ to allow as an attachment. I've attached the first two, and will attach the last four on a follow on comment. I hadn't noticed how long the debug file is (a little over 1mb as a text file) so maybe that is an indicator of the problem.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Attached are parts 3-5 of the debug file. I'll do another reply with the last part, but I'm not sure it is the true ending of the file. I noticed that my text editor stops at line 21095, so maybe this is just as far as the editor could read.

Here is the final part of the log file, with the caveat that my text editor may not have loaded the entire thing.


Edit: I opened the file with nano and it showed the same ending line so it doesn't look like gedit was truncating it after all.

Looking at this further, I'm not sure there is an actual write error. From the end of the debug file, the disc was written 100%. There isn't an error, but the last operations look like an attempt to determine the size of the created disc. It makes me wonder if this isn't what is failing:

I tried just creating an iso image with k3b first with another data set. The iso image created fine and is 21.4 GB (21,380,579,328 bytes) on the disk. Then I tried to write it to a 25 GB blu ray BD-R disc, and k3b gave me a "Waiting for Disk - K3b" dialog box:

If I cancel that out and right click on the empty BD-R medium in the k3b gui, it shows the disc is large enough:

Doing some more searching it looks like the original issue I described (fatal error at the end of the burn) has been around for quite some time. K3b claims to have fixed this quite some time ago.

I'm not sure what to make of all of this. Is anyone here able to burn Blu Ray discs in linux without the problems I'm running into?

After some more searching I'm thinking that blu ray data recording isn't something that is solid on linux yet. I found this thread on ubuntu forums which is from March of 2011 asking if anyone had a configuration that worked. This is over a year ago, but the latest version of k3b was released in January of 2011. On the bright side I downloaded nero 4 for linux and it is working very nicely.

For anyone who finds this thread and is troubleshooting a similar problem here is some more information. I tried creating an iso image using K3b and then burning it from the command line using genisoimage. The burning process worked until it went to close the session. Here is the last part of the output:

The disc is still readable, I'm guessing because I'm reading it from a recorder. It passed a compare pass with diff like I used above, and dvdisaster also passed it. This makes me think the k3b error is occuring when it tries to close the session and that all of the discs I wrote with that are unclosed. Since the drive can still read them it probably isn't a huge problem but I'm going to reburn them with Nero anyway. Fortunately I can still burn them in linux.

Also, I want to put a plug in for dvdisaster. By graphing out the read performance by sector it lets you know if you have areas of the burn which had problems. Just because the drive can read a problem sector doesn't mean you want to put it away and call it archived. It spotted a problem area on one disc and I was able to reburn it and probably avoid a problem down the road. This plus the ability to create an extra checksum file for possible recovery down the road is a very nice feature for what I'm doing.