June 6, 2006
Last weekend I bought a stack of DVD-Rs from Staples. When I tried to burn them I failed on 3 of 3 -- data verification errors. Since I'd successfully burned some older DVD+RWs until I ran out, I figured I got a bad batch and returned them.
Then my first burn with the new discs failed also. I reinstalled Nero, just in case, and tried another. Failing the exact same way, and having reduced five DVDs to coasters, I decided it was time to go online and see what the heck was going on.
Turns out the culprit is low system resources. I'm currently casting the stinkeye at BOINC, the SETI At Home screensaver. I'm upgrading Nero to the newest version of things, then I'll reboot and suspend BOINC while I try one more burn. If it succeeds, it will mean I just had a run of good luck with the +RWs and bad luck with the -Rs.
Sorry, friendly Staples cashier. I didn't mean to put one over on you.
Edit, a little while later: Nope, upgrading Nero and shutting off BOINC didn't work: For some reason it just doesn't want to write those files to disc. I'm not pushing the limits of the storage at all, and the errors are happening at about the 2/3 point anyway not at the end.
It's fouling up the burn so badly that I can't even generate a checksum for the files on the DVD. I find it unlikely that I managed to get two bad batches of DVD-Rs, even if they were from the same store, so something else must be wrong. Is the DVD+RW format more tolerant of errors than DVD-R? Is Nero going back and fixing its mistakes on the +RWs and it can't on the -Rs? Is my burner in the process of shitting itself?
Edit, Monday night: Well, a firmware upgrade had an effect: I only got a single batch of bad data this time. I also burned a different group of files that only used about 4200MB. Google has nothing for me, so I'm just going to hope the hard disk doesn't fill up, or start buying +RWs again.
