Hello Andy, thanks for your response. Please note that my somewhat frustrated story was not meant to be an accusation against anyone. It was just a narration of my experiences so far with the hope someone could give me some hints - and not necessarily the author of one of the tools, the existence of which I certainly appreciate :) But back to the facts..
> Does it mean that you did *not* care to upgrade firmware or did you? Of course I did, after I found the version with DOS-installer - it is now on the official 1.08 (including support for a new bunch of media I purchased). > NEC units are well-known for poor support for some DVD-dash > media brands and you better upgrade firmware.. As I mentioned, in my case the dash-media looked a lot better than most of the plus I tried. Not regarding the process of burning, but the results. Unreadable means, parts (something between only the (probably) rear part up to the biggest part) of the DVD cannot be read in my DVD ROM drive (Toshiba). It can read the directory, but when it comes to reading certain data the drive gets stuck. I already did some tests with other ROM-drives. I have not noticed such problems with any dash-media until now. But as I said, can be the poor quality of the media, or the drive being defective when it comes to plus (does it use different write-heads?). After all, I believe the drive is doing the writing as such, not the program sending the data, right? > Does it mean that that application programs succeeded and did not report > any errors, yet one of disc was unreadable? I do not think there is a problem with the recording software here. No error messages with plus. See above. Problems in the writing process / at the end of it are only with dash-media. > It should not be necessary to ask what messages exactly! :) Sorry, was already preparing some log messages. Had no access to them before, should have mentioned that. But had found some of them already in this mailing list, without solutions (then I would not have a problem anymore). > What's dvd+rw-mediainfo output for affected media? ** [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~> dvd+rw-mediainfo /dev/scd0 INQUIRY: [_NEC ][DVD_RW ND-1300A ][1.08] GET [CURRENT] CONFIGURATION: Mounted Media: 11h, DVD-R Sequential READ DVD STRUCTURE[#0eh]: MediaID: VDSPMSAB 01 READ DVD STRUCTURE[#10h]: Media Book Type: 25h, DVD-R book [revision 5] Legacy lead-out at: 2298496*2KB=4707319808 READ DVD STRUCTURE[#0h]: Media Book Type: 25h, DVD-R book [revision 5] Last border-out at: 2298496*2KB=4707319808 READ DISC INFORMATION: Disc status: blank Number of Sessions: 1 State of Last Session: empty Number of Tracks: 1 READ TRACK INFORMATION[#1]: Track State: blank Track Start Address: 0*2KB Next Writable Address: 0*2KB Free Blocks: 2298496*2KB Track Size: 2298496*2KB Same with princo discs (the timeouts of dvdrecord, did not try growisofs with them yet). ** Same disc as above with proDVD-atip: Cdrecord-ProDVD-Clone 2.01a12 (i586-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2003 scsibus: 0 target: 0 lun: 0 Linux sg driver version: 3.1.25 Using libscg version 'schily-0.7' Device type : Removable CD-ROM Version : 0 Response Format: 2 Capabilities : Vendor_info : '_NEC ' Identifikation : 'DVD_RW ND-1300A ' Revision : '1.08' Device seems to be: Generic mmc2 DVD-R/DVD-RW. Using generic SCSI-3/mmc-2 DVD-R/DVD-RW driver (mmc_dvd). Driver flags : DVD MMC-3 SWABAUDIO BURNFREE Supported modes: TAO PACKET SAO SAO/R96P SAO/R96R RAW/R16 RAW/R96P RAW/R96R book type: DVD-R, Version 5 (2.5) disc size: 120mm (0) minimum rate: Not specified (15) number of layers:0 track path: Parallel Track Path (0) layer type: Rewritable Area (2) linear density: 0.267 µm/bit (0) track density: 0.74 µm/track (0) phys start: 196608 phys end: 2495103 end layer 0: 0 bca: 0 phys size:... 2298496 copyr prot type: 0 region mgt info: 0 application code:64 physical code: 193 last rec address:16621272 part v./ext code:5/2 ind wr. power: 234 wavelength code: 11 write str. code: 14 76 78 80 Manufacturer: 'VDSPMSAB 01' rzone number: 1 border number: 1 amage: 0 reserved: 0 blank: 1 incremental: 0 nwa valid: 1 rzone start: 0 next wr addr: 0 free blocks: 2298496 blocking factor: 16 rzone size: 2298496 last recorded addr: 0 ** the log messages after growisofs with dash-medium (after this the result can be mounted under Linux, but is not recognized by Windows) Nov 2 18:51:39 lxMedia kernel: scsi : aborting command due to timeout : pid 66177, scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 0x00 00 00 00 00 00 Nov 2 18:51:49 lxMedia kernel: scsi : aborting command due to timeout : pid 66177, scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 0x00 00 00 00 00 00 Nov 2 18:51:49 lxMedia kernel: SCSI host 0 abort (pid 66177) timed out - resetting Nov 2 18:51:49 lxMedia kernel: SCSI bus is being reset for host 0 channel0. Nov 2 18:51:49 lxMedia kernel: hdc: ATAPI reset complete Nov 2 18:51:51 lxMedia kernel: hdc: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy } Nov 2 18:51:51 lxMedia kernel: scsi : aborting command due to timeout : pid 66177, scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 0x00 00 00 00 00 00 Nov 2 18:51:51 lxMedia kernel: SCSI host 0 abort (pid 66177) timed out - resetting Nov 2 18:51:51 lxMedia kernel: SCSI bus is being reset for host 0 channel0. Nov 2 18:51:53 lxMedia kernel: hdc: ATAPI reset complete This was kernel 2.4.20. ** the log messages after dvdrecord timeout while fixating (after that the result cannot be mounted under Linux, but reading with Windows is no problem - now compare with the situation above :) Nov 4 01:33:15 lxMedia kernel: scsi : aborting command due to timeout : pid 42515, scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 Test Unit Ready 00 00 00 00 00 Nov 4 01:33:25 lxMedia kernel: scsi : aborting command due to timeout : pid 42515, scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 Test Unit Ready 00 00 00 00 00 Nov 4 01:33:25 lxMedia kernel: SCSI host 0 abort (pid 42515) timed out - resetting Nov 4 01:33:25 lxMedia kernel: SCSI bus is being reset for host 0 channel0. Nov 4 01:33:25 lxMedia kernel: SCSI host 0 channel 0 reset (pid 42515) timed out - trying harder Nov 4 01:33:25 lxMedia kernel: SCSI bus is being reset for host 0 channel0. Nothing more ever - bus totally hangs after this, no eject, no mount, any such process not killable (with -9). This was with kernel 2.4.22. Under 2.4.20, it came back to life after about a minute (with log messages like above for growisofs). OK, thats it. Abandon all hope? Looks like the close session / close disk command leads to this when a dash-medium is inside. But is it the drive, the Linux IDE driver, the recording app? Still I would be interested in - Do all recorders only accept media they know? And if yes, and you say NEC has poor support, do all the others have very frequent firmware updates? - Are there drives with Linux-firmware-flashing-tools? Thanks for caring, Florian Lindauer -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]