DVD-R

[Matt Graham]

After a long battle with technology, Donn wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 11:43 AM, Josh Nalli <j.nalli at cox.net> wrote:
>> How come my computer doesnt recognize my dvd-r?  it recognizes a cd-r.  I
>> am using K3b to burn stuff to it.  I have Mandriva Linux.

There is not quite enough information here to really diagnose the problem.  Is 
the DVD-+R IDE, SATA, or USB2?  Does it work for reading discs?

> Open K3B and go to Settings; Configure K3B; Devices and check to see if
> your drive is setup properly. You might have to press the 'Refresh'
> button.

Better:  Check the output of "dmesg | grep DVD" and make sure the kernel has 
recognized the device.  Like so:
mallory:~$ dmesg | grep DVD
hdc: ATAPI 48X DVD-ROM DVD-R-RAM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(66)

...so it's there.  Then check permissions:

mallory:~$ ls -l /dev/hdc
brw-rw---- 1 root cdrom 22, 0 Jun 15 06:13 /dev/hdc

...full access for anyone who's in the cdrom group, so that's all right.  k3b 
works fine for me here.

> If that doesn't work, you might try adding a new drive and deleting 
> the old one.

This should only be necessary if the new drive has a different device name 
from the previous time you used it.  That can easily happen with USB2 
devices, and can also happen with SATA deices.  Most distros running udev 
have some set of rules called 70-persistent-cd.rules or something that will 
generate persistent symlinks for CD-like storage devices, even if the devices 
move across IDE connections after a reboot.

> FWIW, I had a similar problem with a Plextor drive that stopped working for
> DVD-Rs, but still worked for CDRs. I replaced the drive and the new one
> works fine. 

Yay for hardware failures, I guess.

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Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see