I ran up against an interesting (ish) issue this evening. Irina went shopping, and kindly bought back some blank DVDs for me, as I’d just exhausted the previous spindle. Upon inserting the 1st disc, and checking out who really made it etc. with DVD Identifier, I dropped into Nero and was about to start the first burn, when I noticed the speed was set to a maximum of 2.4x, instead of 16x. If it had been 4x or 8x, I’d have just assumed this was due to this batch of discs not being recognised by my burner’s firmware, and so a safer slow speed had been imposed. However, I’ve only ever noticed 2.4x being used with rewritable discs. I clicked through and progressed to burning, where it informed me that my disc (a DVD+R) needed to be formatted! This is a bit like saying your fancy suit shoes needed tarting up, or that your stick insect needed de-worming – it just didn’t make sense. The disc was a DVD+R, not DVD+RW, so formatting was a pointless process. Eventually Nero timed out complaining the formatting process wasn’t possible, and so I tried a second disc, in case there was some sort of manufacturing error on just the one sample. Same problem again 🙁 I tried booting back into Windows XP, using a couple of different burning programs and still got nowhere. After a little searching online, it appears that this manufacturer and specific media type (Ritek F16 (001)) has had problems with other people’s burners as being mistakenly recognised as a DVD+RW. As they burn OK on Ira’s laptop, it isn’t a total loss, but as the files to be archived are on an internal hard drive, I need to burn them via the network, rather than just unplugging a USB cable. Oh, I also checked for any firmware updates for my Sony DRU-860S drive, in case the issue had been fixed by them, but no joy.
[edit]
Ooops. Glad I caught the next problem relatively early. The DVDs that do burn OK on the laptop were only sometimes readable on the main PC. Giving up on that stack of discs 🙁
Tags: Irina, Mum
