[Linux-disciples] CD burner troubles

[Stephen R Laniel]

I think my burner is messed up. It intermittently -- but
frequently -- fails to write CDs properly. E.g., I just
burned the Mandrake installer disc, and the Ubuntu Hoary
Live disc. Both failed during installation; Ubuntu was clear
that it failed because the ACPI file didn't pass its
checksum.

The other day I successfully burned WordPerfect to a CD --
two CDs, I think, and possibly three (the third install
didn't complete properly, for reasons that are probably
unrelated to the CD). So I know that it works sometimes. But
it fails a lot of other times. The CDs I'm burning to are
brand new, and this is the first time they've come off the
spindle.

Any idea how I can narrow this down? The GNOME CD burner
always says that the burn completed successfully, so I
gather it will be no help to me. Is there any tool that
writes a large number of files to a disc, and checks how
well the burn went after it finishes the write?

I was getting various SeekComplete errors in dmesg recently,
so I turned off all the hdparm optimizations for the drive
(e.g., no more DMA), and now the errors don't happen. So
that's one variable out the window.

Are CDs often defective? This wouldn't bother me so much if
I knew at the moment I burned the CD that it was going to
fail. But I have to go through the burn->reboot->fail
process more than I'd like.

Any thoughts from more experienced burners?

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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