ive never been able to use my cheap Łshop rw dvd's. I think someone here suggested just keep searching for a brand of DVDrw that works! <div class="gmail_quote">2009/5/27 Tony Travis <<a href="mailto:a.travis@abdn.ac.uk">a.travis@abdn.ac.uk</a>> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Hello, Ubuntistas. I've been struggling for a while trying to work out what is wrong with the DVD writer on my Asus A6K laptop under Ubuntu 8.04 LTS: Seems that the answer is there is nothing wrong with the hardware, but the Gnome DVD burning libraries can only write to virgin DVD media, or DVD media that has been 'fully' erased: sudo dvd+rw-format -blank=full /dev/dvd Not only does this take a long time, but it also uses up the DVD writer laser unnecessarily if you are going to write to the DVD-RW anyway. My work-around was prompted by the diagnostics produced by: growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=image.iso Apparently, if you repeat the "-dvd-compat" it forces DAO (Disk At Once) mode, which does not require the DVD-RW to be erased: growisofs -dvd-compat -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=image.iso Fortunately, I discovered this in time to retrieve all my 'unuseable' DVD-RW's from the bin. How does everyone else re-use their DVD-RW's? BTW, I already know about "k3b" ;-) Bye, Tony. -- Dr. A.J.Travis, University of Aberdeen, Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, Greenburn Road, Bucksburn, Aberdeen AB21 9SB, Scotland, UK tel +44(0)1224 712751, fax +44(0)1224 716687, <a href="http://www.rowett.ac.uk/" target="_blank">http://www.rowett.ac.uk</a> mailto:<a href="mailto:a.travis@abdn.ac.uk">a.travis@abdn.ac.uk</a>, <a href="http://bioinformatics.rri.sari.ac.uk/~ajt" target="_blank">http://bioinformatics.rri.sari.ac.uk/~ajt</a> -- <a href="mailto:ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com</a> <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk</a> <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/" target="_blank">https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/</a> </blockquote></div> <div></div> -- Javad