cdrtools /devel and wodim broken

[Sean C. Farley]

On Tue, 26 Oct 2010, Paul B Mahol wrote:

> On 10/26/10, Jakub Lach <jakub_lach at mailplus.pl> wrote:
>> Joerg Schilling-3 wrote:
>>>
>>> wodim is a dead end from a 6 year old version of cdrecord with the 
>>> DVD support ripped off and replaced by something broken. But there 
>>> have been even more bugs added to wodim and it is not under 
>>> "development" since May 2007.
>>>
>>> If cdrecord gives the same message, I encourage you to make a kernel 
>>> bug report.  This message is a hint to a serious kernel problem. A 
>>> sense key value -1 cannot happen, so you need to find out why the 
>>> SCSI command has not been transported correctly by the kernel.
>>>
>>
>> Hi Joerg.
>>
>> I usually prefer cdrtools, wodim was convenient way to
>> try old code.
>>
>> After booting GENERIC kernel + ahci driver and compiling
>> cdrtools release problem is still present.

*snip*

> I burned bunch of DVD-R, DVD+R and DVD+R DL on FreeBSD 9.0 without any
> problems, using growisofs from ports.
>
> Only problem I ever had was mounting multi-sesion after 4GB (but -r
> flag is nice workaround).

Personally, I have had trouble burning to a DVD+R using cdrecord. 
DVD+RW has generally worked for me on my workstation, however, I noticed 
something interesting last night.  When trying to burn a recovery disc 
using my laptop onto a DVD-RW, a pause occurred near the start of the 
burn, maybe after two blocks were written, with the disc completing the 
burn "successfully".  I use quotes because the disc did not boot.

I am not sure why exactly it would fail (the disc may have been blank, 
but I do not recall), but here is my observation:
1. cdrecord starts examining the disc.
2. Drive spins up.
3. During grace time before burn the drive starts to slow.
4. Burn starts.
5. cdrecord (or driver or drive) pauses a brief amount of time.  I think
    this is what happened with the DVD+R on my workstation when the drive
    increased its speed.
6. Drive spins up.
7. Burn continues until end.

For me, the solution appeared to be setting the grace time to three 
seconds to avoid the slowdown of the drive:  gracetime=3
At least, the disc worked on subsequent burns this way.  Jakub, you may 
try to see if this setting helps.

Sean
-- 
scf at FreeBSD.org