K3b recognises blank DVD, but 'Burn Image' dialog says 'Please insert blank media'
 

I have been burning DVD .iso images today, using K3b. Everything worked fine.

I was prompted to install some updates and did this. I don't recall K3b being affected. Kernel '3.13.5-101.fc19.i686.PAE #1 SMP' was installed. K3b reports it is Version 2.0.2 Using KDE Development Platform 4.11.5

Now, when I load a blank DVD, the K3b main window shows the blank media and is able to give details, but when I invoke the 'Burn Image' dialog, the 'Burn Media' control shows 'Please insert an empty DVD or Blu-ray medium' instead of showing the media and the 'Start' button is disabled.

I have tried rebooting and also a cold restart, but neither idea worked.

Can anybody suggest what on earth is happening?

When you get the message to insert a blank DVD try opening and closing the DVD drawer.

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Steve Stites

how large is the iso you are trying to burn? if it is larger then 4.2G you will run into issues. yes DVDs can hold up to 4.7G, but ive seen the 4.2G as a barrier.

http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/te...age-capacities

that would be form "appy "that rather annoying pop-up that ONLY installs the security updates and misses the normal updates

very annoying indeed !!

try this
after it is done
reboot
and retry burning the iso image

Thankyou jailbait, lleb and John VV, for your replies.

'yum update' only installed libusb just now, so that was not the issue.

I had tried opening and closing the drive, with no success. I had even tried six different blank DVDs, in case I had a bad batch, so the disk carriage was getting quite a work-out.

The answer was found when I looked further into lleb's suggestion that the .iso may be too big. I have been using MythArchive to create video DVD .iso images, which I then burnt using K3b. Previously, this had worked fine, so I assumed (always a bad idea) the .iso would be sized OK: it showed size as 4.4Gb, which is the size of the DVD.

lleb's suggestion of a limit of 4.2Gb gave me furiously to think. Just to check, I found a small (2.7Gb) .iso and asked K3b to prepare to burn that, and the problem went away: the 'Burn Medium' control showed 'Empty DVD-R medium' and the 'Start' button was enabled.

This leads me to deduce K3b silently refuses to burn an .iso large enough to completely fill a DVD. It would help enormously if it actually said "File too large for medium", or something like that: merely asking to have a blank DVD inserted is diabolical!

To see if MythArchive can solve the problem by itself, I have just set it off again, but told it to burn the DVD, instead of just creating the .iso - I will post again here when I have a result in a few hours. (I am expecting it to barf, as it is almost certain to create an image big enough to cause problems, but miracles have happened in the past - so I'm told ...)

Once again, my thanks for your replies. I appreciate the help.

As expected, the attempt to get MythArchive to burn the image failed, with the message that the media was too small. Hmmm ... I will attack this from another angle, if I can think of one. I won't post here again, now that I know K3b is not at fault.