Sony DVD-RW/CD-RW drive problems

I have a Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop with a Sony DVD/CD -RW drive.  This
drive works fine reading CD/DVD disks.  It however never recognizes a
blank CD-R (I would like to burn a CD of pictures).  When I insert a
blank CD-R, the drive scans it for several second then simply gives up
with no error (xcdroast claims there's no CD in the drive).  There are
also no entries in any syslogs.  Any suggestions?  I'd really like to
backup some data.

Turn off the automounting of the CD/DVD device, as root edit
the /etc/fstab file sample below;

/dev/cdrom     /media/cdrecorder    auto    noauto,user,ro  0 0

The output of the typed command 'cdrecord -prcap' sans the quotes will
tell you about the drive and the capabilities of the drive, sippet
below;

$ cdrecord -prcap
Cdrecord-Clone 2.01-dvd (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2004 Jrg
Schilling
Note: This version is an unofficial (modified) version with DVD support
Note: and therefore may have bugs that are not present in the original.
Note: Please send bug reports or support requests to
 http://www.**--****.com/ 
Note: The author of cdrecord should not be bothered with problems in
this version.
cdrecord: Cannot allocate memory. WARNING: Cannot do mlockall(2).
cdrecord: WARNING: This causes a high risk for buffer underruns.
cdrecord: Operation not permitted. WARNING: Cannot set RR-scheduler
cdrecord: Permission denied. WARNING: Cannot set priority using
setpriority().
cdrecord: WARNING: This causes a high risk for buffer underruns.
scsidev: '/dev/cdrom'
devname: '/dev/cdrom'
scsibus: -2 target: -2 lun: -2
Linux sg driver version: 3.5.27
Using libscg version 'schily-0.8'.
cdrecord: Warning: using inofficial libscg transport code version
(schily - Red Hat-scsi-linux-sg.c-1.83-RH '@(#)scsi-linux-sg.c       
1.83 04/05/20 Copyright 1997 J. Schilling').
Device type    : Removable CD-ROM
Version        : 0
Response Format: 2
Capabilities   :
Vendor_info    : 'TOSHIBA '
Identifikation : 'CD/DVDW SD-R6472'
Revision       : 'TU51'
Device seems to be: Generic mmc2 DVD-R/DVD-RW.

Drive capabilities, per MMC-3 page 2A:

  Does read CD-R media
  Does write CD-R media
  Does read CD-RW media
  Does write CD-RW media
  Does read DVD-ROM media
  Does read DVD-R media
  Does write DVD-R media
  Does read DVD-RAM media
  Does not write DVD-RAM media
  Does support test writing


-- 
Contained within the Microsoft EULA;
This Limited Warranty is void if failure of the Product has resulted
from accident, abuse, misapplication, abnormal use or a virus.

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 23:54:40 GMT, Lenard staggered into the Black Sun
and said:



Aye.  Automounting typically causes more problems than it solves IME.
xcdroast is also less than helpful when it comes to reporting errors.
k3b is, IMHO, a much better frontend to cdrecord/mkisofs.


That's only true if the contents of /etc/default/cdrecord are correct.
If that file isn't correct, you'll have to pass the dev= option to
cdrecord to tell it which device to scan.  For distros running 2.6
kernels, you just need to pass it "dev=/dev/hdc" , since on 2.6, CD-R*
drives can be written to without ide-scsi emulation.  Laptop CD-R*
devices are practically always on /dev/hdc because of IDE brain damage.

There were reports of some old DVD-ROM drives that wouldn't read CD-R
media for some reason.  However, if this drive is a DVD/CD-RW, then it
should read and write CD-R media just fine.  Remember that it may take
the drive up to 15 seconds to recognize which medium type an inserted
medium is and adjust itself for that medium.  Until the drive finishes
doing that, you won't be able to read or write that medium.  HTH,

-- 
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin /    mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
 http://www.**--****.com/      /    "He is a rhythmic movement of the
-----------------------------/      penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL

Aye, k3b is nice.



Have seen and heard of a couple (total of three, one personally) of
cases where Dell laptops were shipped with CD/DVD readers only when
they should have been CD-R/DVD drives.


-- 
Contained within the Microsoft EULA;
This Limited Warranty is void if failure of the Product has resulted
from accident, abuse, misapplication, abnormal use or a virus.

No, do not comment out the line, modify it. You need the line for read
access to the media.


This is normal.....


What do you mean by 'attempting to access the drive', are you selecting
the drive icon in the application??

The disc is blank, no need to access the drive in order to write to the
media. 


<snip>

OK, cdrecord see the drive and reports that the drive can write media. 


Place a known blank CD-R or CD-RW in the drive, let the drive check the
drive for the amount of time required. When ready, try starting k3b and
select 'New Data CD Project'. Navigate to where you have your pictures
stored. Select a number of them and drag them (down) to the K3b data
project area. When you are close to the size limit of the CD media
select the burning dialog and try burning the CD. 

If you still have problems, post the error message word for word. Both
k3b and xcdroast will allow you to create a 'log file' to assist you in
this.

Visit;  http://www.**--****.com/ ;Have a look at the Screenshots (link).

Also, k3b, Nautilus, xcdroast and others are just GUI interfaces to the
cdrtools (cdrdao, cdrecord and related packages). You might find this
to be helpful;

 http://www.**--****.com/ 


-- 
Contained within the Microsoft EULA;
This Limited Warranty is void if failure of the Product has resulted
from accident, abuse, misapplication, abnormal use or a virus.

<snip>


OK, you might have a problem with SELinux policies and/or cdrecord
permissions;

$ ls -l /usr/bin/cdrecord
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 352416 Apr  6 13:03 /usr/bin/cdrecord

As root do; 

chmod 755 /usr/bin/cdrecord
chmod 755 /usr/bin/cdrdao  
(they both should already set to this, but jic)

And temporally disable SELinux then try burning again. I suggest that
you modify the /etc/sysconfig/selinux as shown here, and restart the
system;

 http://www.**--****.com/ #using-s-c-securitylevel



-- 
Contained within the Microsoft EULA;
This Limited Warranty is void if failure of the Product has resulted
from accident, abuse, misapplication, abnormal use or a virus.

On Wed, 24 Aug 2005 19:53:00 GMT, Lenard staggered into the Black Sun
and said:



These warnings are normal when you use cdrecord.  I get them as well
and I haven't enabled SELinux.


Yeah, now you if you have cdrecord SUID, it won't work.  *sigh*.


Yes.  It might do something.  Maybe.  However, based on the other bits
you reported about how the drive takes minutes to recognize a burned
CD-R, it might be a hardware problem.  (Now that ide-scsi is deprecated,
though, it's a real PITA to get coherent and useful error messages from
ATAPI devices.  It's always something.)

-- 
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin /    mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
 http://www.**--****.com/      /    "He is a rhythmic movement of the
-----------------------------/      penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL

I've put into our desktop department to get me a new DVD/CD burner put
into the laptop (under warranty).  Hopefully I get the NEC and not the
Sony  (as Dell's message board seems filled with people having issues
with the Sony one).  I've since flashed the drive with the latest
firmware from Dell (using a USB bootable drve to run WinXP, as Dell now
only offers firmware/BIOS updates ala .exe's to be run from Windows,
thanks Dell!!... but I won''t even get started...).  Since then, I've
noticed that the drive not only has problems recognizing already burnt
older CD-R's (from a year or two ago), it will not ever mount a newly
burnt CD-R (I just made one on another machine and it refuses to
mount).  Any reason why older CD-R's will mount but not new ones that
are fine on other machines?  Also since the flash I see error messages
in log whenever I insert a CD-R (below is the syslog from a disk I made
on another computer containing pictures):

Aug 25 13:58:59 penguin kernel: cdrom: This disc doesn't have any
tracks I recognize!
Aug 25 13:59:59 penguin kernel: hdc: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
Aug 25 13:59:59 penguin kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Aug 25 13:59:59 penguin kernel: hdc: ATAPI reset complete