Just recently, I started having issues again, where the burning process (both with growisofs and cdrecord) would *seem* to burn fine, but there'd be an error during the layer flip which caused the disc to be unreadable at that point (ie: halfway through the disc). After a whole lot of investigation and coasters, I found out that I could make use of cdrecord's 'layerbreak' driveropt to result in a disc that was actually readable.
So it sounds like your unit failed to record data at out-most edge? If it's really does not depend on media, then I'd say that your unit is deteriorating and you should consider replacing it...
I've got two questions about this: 1) The cdrecord manpage mentions that using 'layerbreak' will cause the drive to burn using the 'layer jump' method, as opposed to 'sequential recording.' Is there a way to tell growisofs to do the same thing?
'Layer jump' is DVD-R/DL recording mode and it's not supported by growisofs for reasons discussed at http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/-RW/. This however does *not* mean that growisofs can't control layer break position on DVD+R/DL. For example, if you specify -dvd-compat at growisofs command line, then it will automatically "fold" recording in the middle and record equal amount of data in both layers. You can also specify layer break position manually with -use-the-force-luke=break:NNNNNN, where NNNNN is amount of 2K blocks to layer break. Normally you'd use it when pinpointing layer break in DVD-Video recording in order to improve experience (commonly you'd want layer break on chapter point or dark and silent scene). But once again, I'd recommend to consider replacing unit. A.