Problem burning/mounting discs, ruled out hardware issue
 

This is a problem that I've known about for a while, but since I don't burn cds that often I haven't worried about it. But I need to do a lot of burning soon, so I want to try to resolve this.

When I try to burn a disc, it goes through the motions - says its burning, has an xfer rate, says Burning Complete when its finished. The disc even has the visible circle where data was written.

But the disc is unusable after burning. If I tell it to Verify Data after burning (I use K3B), the software just freezes when it begins the verification. Inserting the disc and trying to read it just results in a lot of bad sounds from the cd tray, with the disc speeding up and slowing down.

I can write discs from Windows on virtual box using the same drive, so I know it isn't a problem with the drive itself. I think most likely its a problem with my fstab:

Not sure if there's something new I need in there or what, or if the fstab is completely irrelevant in this case. Would love to hear any suggestions. Thanks!

As you are using K3B, try setting Multisession Mode to No Multisession on the Misc tab in the Burn dialog.

I have had similar problems with k3b in the past. I switched to xfburn (available at slackbuilds.org) and it worked.

Brian

Tried both of the above suggestions, no luck with either

Verify that the underlying tool(s) are working properly. Create an ISO image with your favorite tool (K3B, mkisofs, Graveman ...) then use cdrecord to burn that image.
dev=/dev/sr0 - for the first optical drive
fs=32M - set a (high!) fifo buffer size of 32MiB
-v - verbose output
-eject - take a guess what that does ;)
Considering the above is true, this appears to be a simple software/options problem. I'm using K3B Version 2.0.80, with cdrecord Cdrecord-ProDVD-ProBD-Clone 3.01a02, on 32bit, and 64bit, with SATA and PATA recorders.


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There are known issues with some chipsets and libata. Plus some weird issues certain optical drives and Linux.
For completeness and to help the search engines -
Kernel version?
IDE/SATA chipset?
Optical Drive Model, and is it PATA or SATA?

I have found that lowering the burn speed may be necessary to get reliable disk writes.
Are there any clues in the log file that K3B generates?

I've never had this issue myself but it does help to create a group "burning" just to be safe and then add your users to the group as needed. K3b seems to be very picky about this.

For most isos I usually just have it burn them using the default settings but on the lowest possible speeds (usually 4x/6x/8x if supported) due to the fact some disks can handle high speed burns but often not due to hardware being a variable in quality.

I often will click Verify Writes and let it run and it runs without issue. Low speed burning is probably your best bet here.

Also if you burn a CD/DVD for storage purposes use the default Linux+Windows option for burning method so it writes as a normal data disk.

@disturbed: Having trouble actually mounting a cd at all apparently (I don't use my disc drive often). It detects the blank disc when I have a burning app open though.

@allend: Where do I find the K3B log file at? I prefer xfburn now that BCarey introduced it to me, but they both have the same problem right now.

@reaper: I just tried adding the group and burning again, with no luck.

Could someone post the parts of their fstab that deals with the disc drive? I still think that's part of the problem, especially now that I realise I can't even properly mount a pre-burned disc.

If the disc is blank, there's nothing to mount ;)

HAL (or udisks) takes care auto-magically mounting removable media.
There is no need to put anything in the fstab for optical disks.

I mean the app detects when there's a blank disc in, but when I put a non-blank disc (my slackware disc for example), it isn't detected.

edit: Correction, I just tested in KDE and inserting a disk works fine as far as mounting. So this is an xfce-specific problem, apparently

Stock Xfce? Or Robby's Xfce 4.8.x?
Some people have some issues with Xfce 4.8.x, depending on if they're using startx from init 3, or a different DM besides KDM. Seems the problem has to do with the way policy-kit/udisks/something is initialized.

Starting Xfce from KDM has never showed an issue here.

Did you ever try cdrecord from the command line? Did it work?

stock xfce.

I couldn't get a disc to mount to copy an image but I downloaded Puppy Linux and tried to burn it.

Command and output were:

Same result with this burn. Disk written but unusable.

You may want to investigate a firmware update.
You may want to try disks from a different manufacturer.
From http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=8000

discs aren't the issue. Like I said I've had this problem for months, using other spindles. I've only recently needed to actually fix it.

Firmware might be a good idea though, I'll look at updating

I think that you cannot discount the possibility of a media problem.