Re: HP dvd300e horror story
> I plugged the DVD
> burner into USB2.0 it showed up beautifully. With some playing, I was
> able to rip an Audio CD with grip, burn a CD-R with gnome-toaster, and
> watch a DVD movie with mplayer all with minimal effort. If this is all
> you want out of the drive STOP here.
Well, this is a bit misleading conclusion:-) The trouble is apparently
caused by dvd+rw-booktype utility, which is *not* essential for DVD
recording per se. I mean I find it hard to believe that growisofs and
dvd+rw-format would cause that kind of damage, at least they're known to
work with other brands. As page mentions dvd+rw-tools [initially] arose
from guesswork and I want to point out that this [still] applies to
dvd+rw-booktype utility so to say 200%.
> I was aware there were firmware updates available on HP's support FTP,
> but assumed because this was a brand new drive, no updates were
> necessary.
Well, "recently purchased" doesn't necessarily means "recently
manufactured," take nothing for granted:-)
> As soon as a put a DVD+RW disc inside the drive and ran
> dvd+rw-format /dev/scd0 I got further, but the disc failed formatting
> after only 2 minutes. (Can't remember the exact error)
Format procedure is expected to be short. The fact that it tool "only 2
minutes" doesn't mean it was unsuccessful.
> #!/bin/csh
> #
> ...
> dvd+rw-format -force /dev/scd0
> dvd+rw-booktype -dvd-rom-spec -unit+rw /dev/scd0
I bet you've downloaded script elsewhere... Note that neither of the
above two are essential for DVD recording. The fact that dvd+rw-format
is present in script most likely means that the script was written for a
1st generation unit, those were capable of burning DVD+RW only.
dvd+rw-format is not required if you use growisofs 5.10 or later (as it
applies the formatting procedure whenever appropriate automatically).
dvd+rw-booktype uses vendor-specific commands, i.e. commands vendors are
free to assign own meanings for, which can have undesirable effect on
units of different brands (for example I had to cycle power of Pioneer
unit after dvd+rw-booktype attempt). In other words it's plain wrong to
hard-code dvd+rw-booktype into a general purpose script.
> $ dvd+rw-format /dev/scd0
> $ growisofs -dvd-compat -overburn -Z /dev/scd0 -R -udf Pictures/
>
> Everything went smoothly. I was able to mount the DVD and read the
> information just fine.
but
> ... set the book-type to dvd+r spec with
??? Most commonly you want to set it to DVD-ROM, which is actually
default factory setting...
> $ dvd+rw-booktype -dvd+r-spec -unit+r /dev/scd0
> *BLINKEY BLINKEY*
> Again, the drive is toast.
Ouch! dvd+rw-booktype has been tested with all HP units, but only with
IDE connected ones. One possible explanation might be that
dvd+rw-booktype passes down wrong command data block length. It might be
that those vendor-specific commands are actually 12 bytes long and not
10 as dvd+rw-booktype implies (200% guesswork, remember?). How come it
works with IDE units you may ask. Well, ATAPI ignores actual command
length and pads all commands up to 12 bytes. As simple as that...
Well, one can only advise to abstain from using dvd+rw-booktype with
external units till further notice. Unfortunately there is no guarantee
that further notice will actually ever appear:-( But once again,
dvd+rw-booktype is not essential for DVD burning per se and the fact
that you can't use it doesn't really mean that you can't record DVDs (as
you could have noticed yourself). Cheers. A.
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