Hello all, I just joined the list so I hope this is the correct list for this type of problem.
I just purchased a new dual format DVD burner. It is an Utmost Technology unit. As I understand this drive is distributed by several manufacturers. I purchased the first unit on Friday and I was not able to get it to work correctly so I returned it as defective for an exchange. The second drive exhibits the same behavior as the first. So two bad drives is less likely, not impossible though. The first drive identified itself as "Generic 2.15" and the second drive identified itself as "Optorite DVD RW DD0203 2.11". I have located a firmware update for the DD0203 drive from Optorite and updated the firmware to 2.30. Still having the same problems. I have also been able to confirm that the drive will burn a DVD+RW correctly under Win98SE using Nero 5.5.10.54. I use the Linux DVD software tools from Andy Polyakov for the last two years under Linux. My current kernel is 2.4.22 since last August running Slackware 8.1. System is Intel P-III, 1 GHz and 768 MByte RAM. I have several DVD+RW drives. A HP dvd300i, and a few HP dvd100i units. Most of these are connected through firewire bridges. This DD0203 unit is currently installed directly to the IDE bus. The growisofs program works well with all of my drives. I also have the kernel patch applied to enable the use of sdd directly without going through growisofs using the raw device. The burn process will complete without any errors, however, the resulting disk is not usable. It can be mounted and a directory can be read. But the files will all return seek errors like below. scsi0: ERROR on channel 0, id 0, lun 0, CDB: Request Sense 00 00 00 40 00 Current sd0b:00: sense key Medium Error Additional sense indicates No seek complete I/O error: dev 0b:00, sector 52996 These errors are typical of the burned DVD+RW from other drives as well. The media can be erased and then reused. I have confirmed that the media is usable in another drive. I have also tested with three different types of media; plain (or no name bulk type), Sony and HP. All were burned at 2.4x speed. I attempted to burn a simple CDR as well on the unit using cdrecord. It proceeds as normal and completes. But if I attempt to read the image back to a file three times in a row, all three files are different sizes and the process end with an I/O error. This type of error is shown below. The sector reference below keeps changing, hence the different file size of the output. scsi0: ERROR on channel 0, id 0, lun 0, CDB: Request Sense 00 00 00 40 00 Info fld=0x2a134, Current sd0b:00: sense key Medium Error Additional sense indicates No reference position found I/O error: dev 0b:00, sector 689360 However, I attempted to read it several times in another drive and it read OK all three times. So it appears that the burned CDR can be read reliably from another drive, just not from the drive that burned it. The same test using a pressed silver CD disk, produced no errors and returned exactly the same file size all three times. In addition all three files compared perfectly with each other. Because the drive burned a DVD+RW disk correctly under Win98SE I am having a hard time condemning the drive itself. The query output of cdrecord is provided below for more information on the unit. bash-2.05a# cdrecord -v -checkdrive dev=0,0,0 Cdrecord 2.01a15 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2003 Jörg Schilling TOC Type: 1 = CD-ROM scsidev: '0,0,0' scsibus: 0 target: 0 lun: 0 Linux sg driver version: 3.1.25 Using libscg version 'schily-0.7' atapi: 1 Device type : Removable CD-ROM Version : 0 Response Format: 1 Vendor_info : 'OPTORITE' Identifikation : 'DVD RW DD0203 ' Revision : '2.30' Device seems to be: Generic mmc2 DVD-R/DVD-RW. Current: 0x0000 Profile: 0x001B Profile: 0x001A Profile: 0x0014 Profile: 0x0013 Profile: 0x0011 Profile: 0x0010 Profile: 0x000A Profile: 0x0009 Profile: 0x0008 Profile: 0x0082 Profile: 0x0081 Profile: 0x0080 cdrecord: This version of cdrecord does not include DVD-R/DVD-RW support code. cdrecord: If you need DVD-R/DVD-RW support, ask the Author for cdrecord-ProDVD. Using generic SCSI-3/mmc CD-R/CD-RW driver (mmc_cdr). Driver flags : MMC SWABAUDIO BURNFREE Supported modes: TAO PACKET SAO RAW/R96R Drive buf size : 3317760 = 3240 KB Perhaps someone on the list has had some experience with this drive to help determine if it should even work or not. Thank you for your time and consideration, James