blank DVDs no recognized, other media OK
I have a puzzling problem I could use some help with. The computer will not burn DVD discs, recognize blank DVDs, recognize DVD movie discs. However, the computer does automatically recognize and automount Audio CDs, blank CD-R discs, and data DVD-Rs. I have tried burning with K3b and other programs but it isn't an application-specific problem. There seems to be some system level problem with recognizing blank DVDs (and commercial movie DVDs). I upgraded the system recently so the problem may be a result of that, but it could have been there for a while and I didn't notice until now. I haven't tried to burn any discs in a couple months. But until recently (well until a couple months ago) all of this worked OK. The kernel, programs, permissions etc were all set up OK and nothing seems to have changed. (growisofs, dvd+rw-tools, etc ARE installed correctly) Note that the drive DOES work (it lights come on, it opens and closes OK) and there is no problem automounting blank or pre-recorded CDs. The problem seems to be JUST with blank DVDs and commercially recorded movie DVDs. I tried several different blank DVDs from a pack that I have used previously with no problems (ie - the problem isn't the medium). K3b, gnome etc all just tell me no media found. Weird huh? Any advice on solving this problem would be greatly appreciated. Craig Debian AMD64 unstable, gnome desktop -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: blank DVDs no recognized, other media OK
On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 08:30:26PM +0900, Craig Hagerman wrote: I have a puzzling problem I could use some help with. The computer will not burn DVD discs, recognize blank DVDs, recognize DVD movie discs. However, the computer does automatically recognize and automount Audio CDs, blank CD-R discs, and data DVD-Rs. I have tried burning with K3b and other programs but it isn't an application-specific problem. There seems to be some system level problem with recognizing blank DVDs (and commercial movie DVDs). I upgraded the system recently so the problem may be a result of that, but it could have been there for a while and I didn't notice until now. I haven't tried to burn any discs in a couple months. But until recently (well until a couple months ago) all of this worked OK. The kernel, programs, permissions etc were all set up OK and nothing seems to have changed. (growisofs, dvd+rw-tools, etc ARE installed correctly) Note that the drive DOES work (it lights come on, it opens and closes OK) and there is no problem automounting blank or pre-recorded CDs. The problem seems to be JUST with blank DVDs and commercially recorded movie DVDs. I tried several different blank DVDs from a pack that I have used previously with no problems (ie - the problem isn't the medium). K3b, gnome etc all just tell me no media found. Weird huh? Any advice on solving this problem would be greatly appreciated. What model of drive? Any chance the DVD laser is toast on the drive, but the CD laser is OK? They are different lasers running different wavelength of light. -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: blank DVDs no recognized, other media OK
Lennart Sorensen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: What model of drive? Any chance the DVD laser is toast on the drive, but the CD laser is OK? They are different lasers running different wavelength of light. Are you sure? I thought they both use red lasers. Matthias -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: blank DVDs no recognized, other media OK
On Tuesday 29 August 2006 09:05, Matthias Julius wrote: Lennart Sorensen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: What model of drive? Any chance the DVD laser is toast on the drive, but the CD laser is OK? They are different lasers running different wavelength of light. Are you sure? I thought they both use red lasers. They are both red, but like he said, different wavelengths. See: http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2002-03/1015981955.Ph.r.html Matthias -- Debian 'Sarge': Registered Linux User #241964 More laws, less justice. -- Marcus Tullius Ciceroca, 42 BC -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: blank DVDs no recognized, other media OK
On Tue, 29 Aug 2006 20:30:26 +0900 Craig Hagerman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have a puzzling problem I could use some help with. The computer will not burn DVD discs, recognize blank DVDs, recognize DVD movie discs. However, the computer does automatically recognize and automount Audio CDs, blank CD-R discs, and data DVD-Rs. If you can mount and read data DVD-Rs but not video DVD then you might not have UDF support in your kernel. Either that or your drive is toast. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: blank DVDs no recognized, other media OK
On 8/30/06, Michael Langley [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you can mount and read data DVD-Rs but not video DVD then you might not have UDF support in your kernel. Either that or your drive is toast. I compiled the kernel about 6 months ago. It had all the necessary modules built at that time and DVDs / CDs mounted or were burnt without any problems. I haven't installed a new kernel since then. I doubt the drive is toast. It is only a year old and (as mentioned) works perfectly well for mounting CDs, burning CDs or mounting a burnt DVD. In my experience if an optical drive goes the whole thing stops working. I will restart from another partition (Ubuntu) just to make sure get back to you about that soon. Craig -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: blank DVDs no recognized, other media OK
On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 10:05:06AM -0400, Matthias Julius wrote: Are you sure? I thought they both use red lasers. DVD is red, CD is infrared. This is why DVD has more space on it. The tracks are narrowe, the pits shorter, and the focal depth much shorter. A CD reflects off the other side of the media, a DVD reflects off the center layer of the DVD (or 1/4 of the way down for the second layer of a dual layer DVD). Older DVD players only had one laser and used lens tricks to read CDs, but could really only read stamped CDs since the lens trick required a lot of reflected light to read, so most CD-R disks and CD-RW disks were unreadable by those players. Most newer DVD players have dual lasers just like DVD drives in computers always had. The wavelengths used are: CD: 785nm DVD: 650nm HD-DVD and BD: 405nm -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: blank DVDs no recognized, other media OK
On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 12:09:05AM +0900, Craig Hagerman wrote: I compiled the kernel about 6 months ago. It had all the necessary modules built at that time and DVDs / CDs mounted or were burnt without any problems. I haven't installed a new kernel since then. I doubt the drive is toast. It is only a year old and (as mentioned) works perfectly well for mounting CDs, burning CDs or mounting a burnt DVD. In my experience if an optical drive goes the whole thing stops working. I will restart from another partition (Ubuntu) just to make sure get back to you about that soon. Actually the HAL used by gnome/kde on newer systems causes serious problems for writing DVD/CD on a lot of systems because it keeps polling the drive to check if there is a disk in there yet. Any chance that is screwing it up? Look for something named vold or hald or something similar. Oh and you might have to be root to write with newer kernels, since they filter low level commands to the drive, and maybe aren't letting through some that are required. A good test is to burn from the command line as root just to make sure. If that works you can go on to work out what is blocking it. -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: blank DVDs no recognized, other media OK
On 8/30/06, Lennart Sorensen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Actually the HAL used by gnome/kde on newer systems causes serious problems for writing DVD/CD on a lot of systems because it keeps polling the drive to check if there is a disk in there yet. Any chance that is screwing it up? Look for something named vold or hald or something similar. I checked that. There IS some hald processes running but what exactly does this mean? $ ps ax | grep hald 2870 ?Ss 0:00 /usr/sbin/hald 2871 ?S 0:00 hald-runner 2877 ?S 0:00 /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-acpi 2886 ?S 0:00 /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-keyboard 2894 ?S 0:02 /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-storage Oh and you might have to be root to write with newer kernels, since they filter low level commands to the drive, and maybe aren't letting through some that are required. It IS a newer kernel. 2.6.16.14. I compiled it about 6 months ago and it worked just fine from that time vis. CD/DVD tasks. A good test is to burn from the command line as root just to make sure. If that works you can go on to work out what is blocking it. Already tried that. Tried growisofs as root from the command line. Said there was no media present (there was). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: blank DVDs no recognized, other media OK
Craig Hagerman wrote: On 8/30/06, Michael Langley [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you can mount and read data DVD-Rs but not video DVD then you might not have UDF support in your kernel. Either that or your drive is toast. I compiled the kernel about 6 months ago. It had all the necessary modules built at that time and DVDs / CDs mounted or were burnt without any problems. I haven't installed a new kernel since then. I doubt the drive is toast. It is only a year old and (as mentioned) works perfectly well for mounting CDs, burning CDs or mounting a burnt DVD. In my experience if an optical drive goes the whole thing stops working. You're mistaken. I've never had an optical drive fail entirely - I've had DVD drives forget how to read DVDs, DVD drives forget how to read CDs, CD Writers which forget the existence of certain brands of blank media... And age isn't a factor. Try borrowing a drive from someone else. I would be VERY surprised if it's not a hardware failure. Try booting a LiveCD from another drive, then burning using your writer, if you're certain it's a distribution problem - a LiveCD is a completely neutral setting that is highly unlikely to suffer from the same (software) problem, but will show the same (hardware) problem if relevant I will restart from another partition (Ubuntu) just to make sure get back to you about that soon. Craig -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: blank DVDs no recognized, other media OK
On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 12:20:46AM +0900, Craig Hagerman wrote: I checked that. There IS some hald processes running but what exactly does this mean? $ ps ax | grep hald 2870 ?Ss 0:00 /usr/sbin/hald 2871 ?S 0:00 hald-runner 2877 ?S 0:00 /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-acpi 2886 ?S 0:00 /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-keyboard 2894 ?S 0:02 /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-storage hal is a hardware abstraction system for monitoring hotplug events of devices, and auto mounting new devices, telling the user (if running gnome or kde or something else hal/opendesktop aware) about the insertion to let them decide what to do. It has an annoying tendancy to very frequently ask the cd/dvd drive if there is a disk in there to mount uet, which causes problems for writing CD/DVD a lot of the time. It could potentially cause problems for DVD movies if the drive needs to be left alone to do CSS key lookups or something. It IS a newer kernel. 2.6.16.14. I compiled it about 6 months ago and it worked just fine from that time vis. CD/DVD tasks. Well try stopping hald. There is probably an init.d script you can call to stop it. Already tried that. Tried growisofs as root from the command line. Said there was no media present (there was). Try it again without hald running. Worth a try after all. -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: blank DVDs no recognized, other media OK
On 8/30/06, Jo Shields [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You're mistaken. I've never had an optical drive fail entirely - I've had DVD drives forget how to read DVDs, DVD drives forget how to read CDs, CD Writers which forget the existence of certain brands of blank media... And age isn't a factor. I have only had problems with one drive before and it seemed to have died completly but I am starting to think that you are right about the drive failing. I rebooted into Ubuntu, and then Windows. With both OS's the behaviour was the same as with my Debian partition. I shut the machine down, and pulled the cables out and re-seated them (just in case) but it is still the same. So... my apologies for bothering the list with what has been narrowed down to some kind of hardware problem. I don't have a CD cleaner - I may buy one tomorrow and try that before buying a new drive on the off chance that that helps. When I put a blank DVD in the drive I can hear it reving up and the access head moving TRYING to read it, and then giving up. Thanks to everyone for your kind help. Craig -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
