[Cialug] DVD burner issue

[David Champion]

James Shoemaker wrote:
> Daniel A. Ramaley wrote:
>   
>> I have a DVD burner that has developed a strange issue. It can burn
>> exactly 1 DVD per power cycle. Attempts to burn a second disc resulting
>> in the drive locking itself, writing just enough to waste a disc, and
>> blocking IO on the write process such that "kill -9" won't even get rid
>> of it. A soft reboot isn't sufficient to clear it; a full power-down and
>> cold reboot is necessary. This is on Debian Testing (amd64) with a
>> 2.6.30 kernel.
>>
>> Has anyone seen this? My initial guess would be that i need a new drive,
>> but i'm not convinced that guess is correct. When i boot up i get these
>> in the kernel log that don't look good:
>>     
>
>    I saw a similar issue and it ended up being a hardware issue, I 
> replaced the burner and the problem went away.  Since it was an external 
> burner I could power cycle it without bouncing the whole computer, but 
> it would only burn one DVD per reset and I never figured out why.  at 
> the price of DVD burners I didn't work too hard to figure out either.
>
> James
>   
You could try Ubuntu or some other boot disc to see if it's a software / 
driver issue pretty easily. I hate to replace "perfectly good" hardware 
unless I have to (*1) but a generic replacement drive is probably going 
to be pretty cheap.

*1: I have an old DVD-ROM drive I use for installing DVD image distros 
on systems that normally don't have a DVD drive in them, the ejector 
motor / gearing / sensor is messed up, so if you don't have a disc in 
the drive, it will eject and stay open, but if you put a disc in, it 
works OK. I could replace it for $10, but why... when this one "works"??? ;)

-dc