[chasg]

Hi All,

My DVD burner is suddenly turning out discs that are failing verification.

I've burned a couple of hundred successful discs with this particular burner/Mac combination. The last 50 or so discs I've successfully burned (not one coaster in that last 50) are all RITEK 4x certified (mine is a mere 2x burner).

_Nothing_ has changed, not hardware, not software, not media, in the last 50 burns.

In the last two days, 8 discs I've burned have all failed verification.

Ok, I realise that one obvious problem is that my burner has suddenly failed. That makes me ask the question: what can fail in a DVD burner?

And if it's not the burner, what else could be going wrong?

Help, I'm really desperate here :-(

Chas

[chasg]

umm, anyone?

(remember: _really_ desperate. I can't even reinstall OSX to see if it is the problem, 'cause there's no more room anywhere to archive the previous install now...)

[Apfhex]

What kind of burner do you have?

If you want to test if it's a software problem, try creating a new User account and burning something. Since you say nothing has changed about your software/hardware configuration, maybe something could have happened within your user account?

Maybe not quite the same, but I had the slot-loading combo drive in my TiBook suddenly start producing coasters some time back (burning succeeded but verification failed and the discs wouldn't work - but in my case ALL CD/CD-R/CD-RW discs stopped working, though DVDs were OK), and rather than try and fix it I bought another (external) drive, figuring it was cheaper than sending it to Apple or something else (since I don't have AppleCare).

[chasg]

Hi Apfhex, sorry to take so long to get back to you.

Well, I'm pretty sure that that burner is a no-go: I pulled the burner out of my G4 and put it into my old blue and white G3 (which acts as my server, and is running OSX 10.2 Server). Same verification errors.

Time to get a new one (arrrgh, it's only two months out of warranty!). At least I'll be able to get a 4x or even 8x drive (this one was a 2x, and took ages to burn a disc!).

Thanks again for the advice (got any suggestions as to a quality brand to look for?)

cheers!

Chas

[SSharon]

Well what brand did you have in there? I would take a look at some of the deals at newegg.com they have some 8x drives for $100 but I have never used any brands other than the pioneer my mac came with and the Lite-on I put in and they have both worked well.

Also you say disk verification failed . . . I have had toast tell me that ver. failed when burning over 700mb to a CD (like 701.5mb) the disk still works fine though, its just that toast was pissed b/c there was no space left for it to close the disk properly.

[velodev]

Is it possible one of the files you are trying to copy is giving the error?

Try restoring permissions. I really have no clue but it's possible it isn't the burner. Or, if I am off my rocker and you already established you are using different sets of data... try taking a compressed air canister and cleaning out the drive. Maybe it is dusty.

[chasg]

HI velodev and SSharon, sorry to take so long to reply to your reply (funny, I never got an email letting me know that I'd got replies to this thread??)

If you check out this new thread (sorry to start another one, I wanted to raise the profile of what is now a very disturbing issue), you'll see that I bought a new DVD burner (I'm afraid that I took advantage of my own situation to get new equipment, it's a failing of mine javascript:smilie('')). Burns with it are consistently failing too.

I established that it was not a particular file causing the problem (by attempting to burn files from different drives), nor is it the particular DVD-R media (I'm getting failure with CD-R burns too).

SSharon, the verification errors are happening even with not full test discs (it was a good point to look for, thanks).

I am at this moment trying to shuffle files (over 100baseT ethernet, slow!) from the desktop machine to the iBook, and will burn to the new DVD burner from the iBook. That'll at least allow me to free up some space on the desktop G4 to reinstall OSX (though I'm about to try to repair permissions once I finish writing this...I don't hold out a lot of hope).

What is the definitive utility software for OSX these days? Is it still Norton Utilities? (I'm now beginning to assume the problem lies with the Mac itself. I sure hope not, a new machine is _way_ beyond my budget at the moment).

Thanks very much for the advice, I do appreciate it.

Chas

[d4nth3m4n]

you have an ibook with a dvd burner?

is it something like your license is up with toast? need to update? this has all the pinnings of a software problem. have you tried to burn with disk utility? talk to me here.

[chasg]

it's an external burner.

details here