CD/DVD Burner Not Working--Very Odd Behavior

[Mark Stone]

--- On May 23 "Josh Stegmaier" said: ---

> I've recently been experiencing some very strange behavior from my CD/DVD
> burner.... I read around a bit, and decided to get Gnomebaker. I downloaded it,
> and tried to get it to burn something, but it wouldn't recognize the blank disc
> either. Thinking maybe it was a problem with the disc, I switched to another
> one, then a third, finally realizing that, in fact, it wasn't just the
> programs that weren't recognizing the blank discs, but my computer wasn't
> seeing them at all....I test several other discs, and even borrowed a different
> brand of CD-R from a friend to try, but nothing worked. Finally, I tried a blank
> DVD-R, which was recognized. However, when I tried to burn about 3.8 GB worth
> of stuff on to the 4.7 GB disc, I was told to insert a disc with at least 3.8 GB
> free.... Considering all this stuff had just worked the
> day before, I was really getting worried my CD-R/DVD-R drive was ruined.

I've had similar problems: blank CDs not recognized when inserted,
writes that fail to start because not enough available space is
recognized (on a completely blank CD), partial success with some
writes, but overall dismal failure.

In my case it turned out to be a hardware problem, completely
unrelated to Ubuntu.

Here's how you can tell: boot to another distro or OS and try to burn
a CD/DVD. Now, in my case my machine is not dual boot. So I use the
live Linux CD "System Rescue CD", which:
- boots from CD without me having to tamper with my existing hard drive install;
- contains cdrecord as one of its programs;
- enables you to boot entirely into RAM so you can actually remove the
CD and try other things (like cdrecord) with the drive.

You can get "System Rescue CD" from http://www.sysresccd.org, but
Knoppix or any number of other live CD distros should work too (Damn
Small Linux, Puppy Linux, whatever). Of course, if you don't have one
of these already, then you're going to need access to a machine with a
working CD burner to create one.

In any case, if another OS or distro can't burn reliably either, then
you probably have a hardware problem.


-Mark Stone