Re: Burn problems. Was: CD DVD drive docs
On 08/22/2015 12:31 PM, Thomas Schmitt wrote:
Hi,
hours and hours of extra time
spent each week trying to write images or backups that just fail during the
burn attempt with no error messages that a mere non-programmer like me can
understand.
Ok. Take a deep breath and then let's go to the work
of problem diagnosis.
If / when I have time, I'll try to work on the diagnosis. Right now, I
just need to get the data backups done. I'm on a medical regime that has
me 5 days in the hospital and two days out most of the year. Then every
six months I'm in the hospital for a whole month straight. The hospital
is hours of travel away. That doesn't leave much time for troubleshooting.
I can't even figure out what to file a bug report against!
Best against the backend program that failed.
Candidates are: cdrecord, growisofs, wodim, cdrskin, xorriso, libburn.
Can you find out which one was used with your recent
failures ?
All of them! Multiple failures for each.
Best together with the options used.
If so, then we should begin by running their job from
the command line, enable more verbosity and research
about their messages.
Else we start from scratch by burning an image.
You need a terminal window with shell prompt for:
xorriso -as cdrecord -v dev=/dev/sr0 blank=as_needed your_image_file.iso
That's how I'll run the backups this evening -- if I can get out to buy
some disc types that stand a better chance of working, though I guess
you're more interested in the failures than in the successes. Heh.
I assume you have only one optical drive installed.
Thus address /dev/sr0. In case of two drives it might
be /dev/sr1, as well.
-v will cause some messages about progress.
This will blank a CD-RW or unformatted DVD-RW, if it
contains data. On other media or states it has no effect.
Then it will burn the file "your_image_file.iso" to the
medium.
xorriso is available as Debian package "xorriso".
If it fails, mail a report with your exact command
line and all messages from the run to
bug-xorriso@gnu.org
If there are too many messages, then repeat the try
while redirecting output to a file
xorriso ...above.options... 2>&1 | tee -i /tmp/xorriso.log
and attach the file /tmp/xorriso.log to your mail.
If it succeeds then we can look at your other use
cases.
I'll do that if I can get some DVD+RW discs on hand. I really need this
to succeed more than I need useful test results. I know that's not
helpful to you, but I'm in kind of a hard spot here.
Has no one bothered to at least publish information about which disc types
work best?
It depends much on the individual drive. When they get older,
they begin to misburn some types first.
As soon as misburn for drive-media reasons becomes frequent
and different media brands or types are affected, it is time
to get a new burner.
But first we have to make sure that the burner is to blame.
In general, DVD+RW and BD-RE are good re-usable media.
All non-re-usable media should work fine, too.
DVD-RW and DVD-RAM are often the first ones to fail
on ageing drives.
Even the brand-new drives were failing to burn much / most of the time.
I really saw no difference in the failed burn rate. The oldest drives
are three years old and have, until the past few months of constant burn
failures, been used to burn 1-2 discs per week -- so not heavy use for
most of their lives.
you must be even more frustrated by it.
Actually i keep slightly ill drives and media on purpose.
This exercises my software and makes life interesting
(if one is into programming of such stuff).
Users who have other goals in virtual life will be better off
with trashing bad hardware.
But as said, first we need to identify the points of failure.
I tried trashing "bad" hardware and found new hardware to have as much
trouble as the old. So I thought I had more or less ruled out hardware
as the problem.
As for Linux, kernel, and arrogance: It's not only for free,
anybody of us is free to improve it. So complaining directly
leads to the question in return, what the complainer did to
improve.
The sufficient answer is: "I honestly did my best."
In your special case: Submit requested info, stay in touch
with the diagnosis work until it is done or declared futile.
Be patient with your software suppliers. They have their
own motivations and some even have a real life.
I do understand all of that very well. My problem is that my own "real
life" is difficult enough to get through that I just need to have the
data backups succeed effortlessly. If some of the wear and tear I
experienced could have been prevented by a heads up, that would have
been a huge boon to me.
Have a nice day :)
Thomas
You, too. I'm impressed by your efforts and by your approachability. My
irascibility is at least partly due to my feeling rather shopworn these
days. It's almost painful to spend several hours accomplishing the
backup of less than 10 GB of data when it used to take less than an
hour, including hash checks of source file and disc to confirm success.
If I've got the wherewithal, I'll be back in touch. Please know that I
do appreciate your work.
Best regards,
Jape
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