DVD Burner no longer recognising blank disc

[stuarte9]

Hi,

I'm using Kubuntu 14.04 LTS on an old 32-bit P4 system and it is working well, mostly.

Recently I tried to burn an iso image to a blank dvd-rw disc. Both K3B and Brasero requested that I put a blank disc into the burner. However, I had placed the disc into the burner before starting each of those programs.

To test the burner, I placed into it the dvd-rw disk onto which I had successfully burned the Kubuntu iso image. On rebooting the system, it was able to display the Kubuntu "Try Kubuntu/Install Kubuntu" welcome screen from that dvd-rw disc.

I then closed down the running dvd-rw instance of Kubuntu, powered down the system, removed that disc, and then rebooted the system without any disc in the burner, letting the system successfully boot from the hdd instance of Kubuntu.

From this it would seem that the burner is working correctly as far as reading a previously burned dvd-rw disc is concerned and that the fault lies somewhere within the hdd instance of Kubuntu.

The output from dmesg | egrep '(CD|DVD)' is listed below.

[ 4.675751] scsi 2:0:1:0: CD-ROM LITE-ON COMBO SOHC-5232K NK06 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 4.739109] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
[ 4.760556] sr 2:0:1:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0
[ 5.055631] ata4.01: ATAPI: TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S202J, SB00, max UDMA/66
[ 5.391946] scsi 3:0:1:0: CD-ROM TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S202J SB00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 5.510298] sr 3:0:1:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr1

As you can see I have two optical drives installed. The burner is the TSSTcorp unit. This is verified by the output from sudo lshw -class disk part of which is listed below.

*-cdrom
description: DVD reader
product: COMBO SOHC-5232K
vendor: LITE-ON
physical id: 0.1.0
bus info: scsi@2:0.1.0
logical name: /dev/cdrom
logical name: /dev/sr0
version: NK06
capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd
configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc
*-cdrom
description: DVD-RAM writer
product: CDDVDW SH-S202J
vendor: TSSTcorp
physical id: 0.1.0
bus info: scsi@3:0.1.0
logical name: /dev/sr1
version: SB00
capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram
configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc

I should also state that the blank dvd-rw disc that was not recognised is from the same collection of dvd-rw discs one of which was successfully used to burn the Kubuntu iso image. Other discs from this collection have also been used successfully for burning iso images using either K3B or Brasero. The program used in these cases was immaterial in that the burns were completed successfully.

Could someone please point me in the direction of where to look in Kubuntu to find out what has changed and how to correct this change.

Thanks in advance for nay help that you can give with this.

Best regards,

Stuart

[oshunluvr]

Try installing libcdio-utils and also do dmesg after inserting a blank disc and see what it says.

[stuarte9]

Hi oshunlvr,

Thanks for the swift reply.

As requested, I have installed libcdio-utils. Now what do I do with it ? Is there a good tutorial for it somewhere ? The web doesn't seem to show any.

Also, I did do dmesg after inserting a blank disc. However, this produced so much output that I think it would be frowned upon to include it all in this reply. I have(!) saved it to a text file just in case I have to do a manual search through it.

Isn't this one of those times when the output of dmesg should be piped through egrep ? If so, what parameter should I give to egrep ?

Thanks in advance for any further help you may be able to give with this.

Best regards,

Stuart

[oshunluvr]

In this case, the best way to view the dmesg output is to view dmesg, then insert the disc, then view dmesg again to see what was added. Using grep may hide some useful output.

The way to post lengthy text is to either enclose it in quote or code tags (via the format bar) or to attach a text file (available if you select "Go Advanced").

As far as libcio-utils - it includes other tools for cd/dvds that other programs can use as well as command line tools:
http://www.gnu.org/software/libcdio/

[stuarte9]

Good afternoon oshunlvr,

Thank you for another swift reply.

"In this case, the best way to view the dmesg output is to view dmesg, then insert the disc, then view dmesg again to see what was added. Using grep may hide some useful output."

I wonder if there is some sort of diff tool that could be used here, to speed things up. Save the two versions of dmesg output to two different text files then use the diff tool to show up the differences. I know it can be done for source code. Just had a quick look around the web and it seems that there are several tools for this, such as cli-based diff, or vimdiff, or gui-based diffuse. I think I'll try the latter.

Also, thank you very much for the libcdio link. Very informative, even on just an initial scan.

Update: I've just used diffuse on the two instances of dmesg output. There is not a single difference between the two instances.

I'm beginning to wonder if this is a driver issue and, if so, how I update a burner driver on a linuix system. (This task is a doddle on that other OS.)

Best regards,

Stuart