[Pkg-opt-media-team] Bug#724964: growisofs: fails to burn DVD-RW media with error "SK=5h/ILLEGAL MODE FOR THIS TRACK"

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

> I forgot to say that there were no such problems a few months ago,
> with the same DVD and the same machine (and drive).

This is a common pattern with ageing drives and DVD-RW.

I am developer of burn software myself (libburn ... xorriso)
and am currently discussing a very similar case with one
of the users. He experimented with DVD-RW. Blanking, formatting,
burning data, ... forth and back. Suddenly he experienced
  3 73 04 PROGRAM MEMORY AREA UPDATE FAILURE
and the medium was not usable any more.

Then he put that DVD-RW into the drive of a laptop.
There it is still usable.
He bought new DVD-RW. No luck on his usual drive.
But they are usable with the laptop's one.
My own older drives throw errors on DVD-RW or burn them to an
unreadble state.

The capability to write DVD+RW deteriorates much later
than the capability to deal with DVD-RW.


> I suspect that the blank command actually failed (but why?),
> READ DISC INFORMATION:
>  Disc status:           appendable
> ...
> READ TRACK INFORMATION[#2]:
>  Track State:           invisible incremental
> ...
>  Free Blocks:           1480416*2KB

Indeed the medium is still reported by the drive as being ready
for more sessions (e.g. by growisofs -M) of up to 2.9 GB.
I.e. blanking did not have the normal effect.

There are exactly two applicable variations of the BLANK
command. MMC specs call them "Blank the disc" and "Minimally
blank the disc". Burn programs call them "full"/"all" and
"fast".
So the fault is most likely internal in the drive and its
relation to the medium.


> > You may also try to format it,
> That's much better [...] I'm currently burning it, with no errors.

Let's hope that it is entirely readable.

E.g. inspect the result by dvd+rw-mediainfo and look for a
line "READ CAPACITY". Like
  READ CAPACITY:          779568*2048=1596555264
Then let dd read all blocks
  dd if=/dev/sr0 count=779568 bs=2048 of=/dev/null
and watch for i/o errors or early end of reading.

Or mount the medium and let diff compare the files on medium
with their originals on disc.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas