What happened to DVD writing?

[Martin Kjeldsen]

Zaphod Beeblebrox (21:12 2009-09-20):
> On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 4:35 PM, Richard Mahlerwein <mahlerrd at yahoo.com>wrote:
> 
> >
> > I have had several exhibit behavior even more odd.
> >
> > The most unusual was this particular CD writer... It read both DVDs and CDs
> > but would write neither (it had worked fine the week before).  I took it out
> > of the drive bay and hooked it to another PC to test and it worked fine
> > there.  I put it back in the original PC and it failed.  I was swapping
> > things around on that PC (assuming bad cable, bad power, etc) and had it
> > sitting loose on the desk and found that it now worked again.  Put it back
> > in the drive cage and it again would not write, though reading was fine.
> > Anyway, I finally figured out that even slight pressure in on the sides
> > where it mounts would make it fail to burn CDs.  The cage itself exerted a
> > bit of pressure and that was enough to make it fail at any attempt to burn a
> > CD.
> >
> 
> This is not necessarily odd.  The CD burner is one of the highest draw bits
> in your system... save possibly your CPU and/or graphics card (depending on
> what they are).  I have found that various DVD drives have been very
> sensitive to power supply voltages and fail to burn properly when they're
> marginal.  Your description here seems to point in that direction.  If it
> works in computer B, try using B's power supply for A --- or maybe B has
> other lighter draws.
> 
> Power supplies can also degrade over time --- especially if you have some
> cheap capacitors in there.
> 
> I find the DVD drive is often the canary for spotting power supply problems.

Hi,

I have the same problem. I can read DVDs and CDs and write CDs, but I'm unable 
to write DVDs. I can't be sure that it is a software problem, but I think it 
happened when upgrading from 8.0-BETA2 to 8.0-BETA4. Not sure at all though.


Martin