[PLUG] DVD+-WTF

[D. Cooper Stevenson]

My wife had this trouble just yesterday--she fixed it (she's my 'secret
weapon).

I'll forward this on to her... she'll be able to provide you with the
details. I'm sketchy on the details, but I know that she burned the
DVD's firmware. 

The key, I think, was modifying the "growisofs" command.

It's worthy of note that we found out a lot about squirelly DVD
manufacturers and the tricks the pull. DVD owners in the U.S, for
example--and again I'm sketchy on the details--should change their DVD
firmware from "Region 1" to "Region 2." The difference, as I recall, is
whether or not you have the ability to burn non-signed files or
something to that effect.

More on this as it becomes available.


-Coop

On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 21:27 -0700, Jeme A Brelin wrote:
> OK, I'm having data throughput problems.  I don't think I should, but 
> maybe somebody knows better.  The motherboard is some Tyan Tiger model 
> (don't recall which at the moment).  Dual Athlon MP 1.8GHz (whatever 
> number designation that is).  1GB RAM.  No swap.
> 
> /dev/hdb -- 120GB IDE drive
> jbrelin at person:~/school$ hdparm /dev/hdb
> 
> /dev/hdb:
>   multcount    =  0 (off)
>   IO_support   =  1 (32-bit)
>   unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
>   using_dma    =  1 (on)
>   keepsettings =  0 (off)
>   readonly     =  0 (off)
>   readahead    = 256 (on)
>   geometry     = 65535/16/63, sectors = 240121728, start = 0
> 
> 
> /dev/hdc -- DVD+-RW drive
> jbrelin at person:~/school$ hdparm /dev/hdc
> 
> /dev/hdc:
>   IO_support   =  0 (default 16-bit)
>   unmaskirq    =  0 (off)
>   using_dma    =  1 (on)
>   keepsettings =  0 (off)
>   readonly     =  0 (off)
>   readahead    = 256 (on)
>   HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument
> 
> /dev/hdd -- DVD-ROM
> /dev/hdd:
>   IO_support   =  1 (32-bit)
>   unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
>   using_dma    =  1 (on)
>   keepsettings =  0 (off)
>   readonly     =  0 (off)
>   readahead    = 256 (on)
>   HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument
> 
> /dev/sda -- 20 GB SCSI HD
> 
> 
> OK, so I'm trying to write some DVDs.
> 
> Created an ISO in a fairly normal way (may as well be a big pile of 
> zeroes, though).  Using growisofs to burn with
> growisofs -Z /dev/hdc=file.iso
> 
> It chugs along for a while (varies wildly) and then the write speed drops 
> to 0.0 for a while and the failure pops up.
> 
> Seems to me like some buffer is emptying, but you'd think if I shut 
> everything else down and ran the thing from tty1, it'd do better.  It 
> doesn't.
> 
> The few times it's appeared to work, the disks had some files that 
> consistently could not be read from any drive (though most of the data can 
> be read from any drive I tried).
> 
> What the hell am I missing?
> 
> J.