Hi, > hours and hours of extra time > spent each week trying to write images or backups that just fail during the > burn attempt with no error messages that a mere non-programmer like me can > understand.
Ok. Take a deep breath and then let's go to the work of problem diagnosis. > I can't even figure out what to file a bug report against! Best against the backend program that failed. Candidates are: cdrecord, growisofs, wodim, cdrskin, xorriso, libburn. Can you find out which one was used with your recent failures ? Best together with the options used. If so, then we should begin by running their job from the command line, enable more verbosity and research about their messages. Else we start from scratch by burning an image. You need a terminal window with shell prompt for: xorriso -as cdrecord -v dev=/dev/sr0 blank=as_needed your_image_file.iso I assume you have only one optical drive installed. Thus address /dev/sr0. In case of two drives it might be /dev/sr1, as well. -v will cause some messages about progress. This will blank a CD-RW or unformatted DVD-RW, if it contains data. On other media or states it has no effect. Then it will burn the file "your_image_file.iso" to the medium. xorriso is available as Debian package "xorriso". If it fails, mail a report with your exact command line and all messages from the run to bug-xorr...@gnu.org If there are too many messages, then repeat the try while redirecting output to a file xorriso ...above.options... 2>&1 | tee -i /tmp/xorriso.log and attach the file /tmp/xorriso.log to your mail. If it succeeds then we can look at your other use cases. > Has no one bothered to at least publish information about which disc types > work best? It depends much on the individual drive. When they get older, they begin to misburn some types first. As soon as misburn for drive-media reasons becomes frequent and different media brands or types are affected, it is time to get a new burner. But first we have to make sure that the burner is to blame. In general, DVD+RW and BD-RE are good re-usable media. All non-re-usable media should work fine, too. DVD-RW and DVD-RAM are often the first ones to fail on ageing drives. > you must be even more frustrated by it. Actually i keep slightly ill drives and media on purpose. This exercises my software and makes life interesting (if one is into programming of such stuff). Users who have other goals in virtual life will be better off with trashing bad hardware. But as said, first we need to identify the points of failure. As for Linux, kernel, and arrogance: It's not only for free, anybody of us is free to improve it. So complaining directly leads to the question in return, what the complainer did to improve. The sufficient answer is: "I honestly did my best." In your special case: Submit requested info, stay in touch with the diagnosis work until it is done or declared futile. Be patient with your software suppliers. They have their own motivations and some even have a real life. Have a nice day :) Thomas
