CD burning problems

[pindakoe]

I have an issue with my Plextor CD burner. I do not know exactly when this started. I found it in my oldest log mid January (and I tend to update to new Kernels as mandriva makes them available). Description of the issue:

 

* My drive works direct after boot to read CDs. Syslog doesn't contain anything special.

* wodim (or cdrecord) -scanbus identifies my drives correctly

* I start a burning session using Brasero or gnomebaker and this fails. Brasero complains there is no empty CD in the drive; Gnomebaker segfaults.

* The logs show the following lines:

Mar 16 21:48:04 localhost kernel: ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
Mar 16 21:48:04 localhost kernel: ata2.00: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:fc/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 pio 81916 in
Mar 16 21:48:04 localhost kernel:		  cdb 46 02 01 07 00 00 00 ff  fa 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Mar 16 21:48:04 localhost kernel:		  res 40/00:02:00:08:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
Mar 16 21:48:04 localhost kernel: ata2.00: status: { DRDY }
Mar 16 21:48:09 localhost kernel: ata2: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
Mar 16 21:48:14 localhost kernel: ata2: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
Mar 16 21:48:14 localhost kernel: ata2: soft resetting link
Mar 16 21:48:19 localhost kernel: ata2.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xa1)
Mar 16 21:48:19 localhost kernel: ata2.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4)
Mar 16 21:48:19 localhost kernel: ata2.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)
Mar 16 21:48:24 localhost kernel: ata2: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
Mar 16 21:48:29 localhost kernel: ata2: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
Mar 16 21:48:29 localhost kernel: ata2: soft resetting link
Mar 16 21:48:40 localhost kernel: ata2.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xa1)
Mar 16 21:48:40 localhost kernel: ata2.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4)
Mar 16 21:48:40 localhost kernel: ata2.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)
Mar 16 21:48:45 localhost kernel: ata2: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
Mar 16 21:48:50 localhost kernel: ata2: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
Mar 16 21:48:50 localhost kernel: ata2: soft resetting link
Mar 16 21:49:20 localhost kernel: ata2.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xa1)
Mar 16 21:49:20 localhost kernel: ata2.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4)
Mar 16 21:49:20 localhost kernel: ata2.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)
Mar 16 21:49:20 localhost kernel: ata2.00: disabled
Mar 16 21:49:20 localhost kernel: ata2.01: failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x40)
Mar 16 21:49:25 localhost kernel: ata2: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
Mar 16 21:49:30 localhost kernel: ata2: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
Mar 16 21:49:30 localhost kernel: ata2: soft resetting link
Mar 16 21:49:30 localhost kernel: ata2.01: configured for UDMA/33
Mar 16 21:49:30 localhost kernel: ata2: EH complete

From that moment on the CD drive continues to spin at medium speed (by the sound of it) and the eject button will no longer do something. The eject command will complete successfully without opening teh drive. The drive no longer appears in the output of 'wodim -scanbus'. It does appear in the MCC (but I believe this is not updated after boot. A google search shows plenty of hits which mostly refer to SATA drives -- my PC is vintage 2004 or thereabouts, i.e. well before SATA.

 

Any clues whether this is hardware or software -- note that I am almost 100% certain that this issue is not related to the cd burning front end (brasero, gnome-baker), but is more fundamental. I will give k3b a spin later (or anything else that seems worthwhile). The only thing I suspect that worked was nero linux; buying this is a bit overkill for my limited demands.

Edited March 16, 2009 by pindakoe

[tux99]

I can't tell what the problem is from the error log, but to help diagnosing it, I would try to boot off an older Live distro (ideally from USB so your CD drive is not tied up) and see if you get the same problem when attempting to burn a CD from that older distro too.

(that would point to a hardware issue if you still get it with the older distro).

[scarecrow]

A few Plextors do have issues under Linux with certain firmware revisions. The reason is the special Plextor features, like securec/varirec/name-your-own-here, which may be handy, but they break MMC-3 compliancy. I had similar issues some years ago, when I owned a Plextor Premium drive.

The best you can do is trying another firmware revision.

[pindakoe]

Thanks for the advice -- I will be trying to locate my 2008.1 CDR and see what that gives.

@scarecrow: any knowledge that 2009.0 is more vulnerable than previous versions -- this PC has been in use since Mandrake 8.0 and burning worked well (once I understood some of the stuff way back when). This type of issue is new since 2009.0

Edited March 17, 2009 by pindakoe

[scarecrow]

It *might* have to do with HAL. The way vodim works is not different from cdrecord/cdrdao which were used a few years ago.

Do you have any CD-ROM entries in fstab? If you do, try commenting them.

And, of course, another thing you should check is if your blanks (I mean the actual dye on them) are in the whitelist for your drive by Plextor.

My Plextor Premium, for example, was very fussy about CMC and Ritek media, while it was burning great Mitsui, Ricoh and Taiyo Yuden blanks.

[pindakoe]

This is where the plot thickens -- lots of new data but the problem and the mystery remains. Here are some tests using LiveCDs:

 

* Mint 5.0 -- fails with same behaviour and error messages when trying to burn using Brasero

* Suse 11 -- burns successfully using K3b, then ejects and drive gets locked (doesn't respond to eject/load button, nor does it respond to the 'Load' button K3B has when you want to verify software. No record of syslog kept. This was using KDE4 as DE.

* 2008.1 -- same result as Suse (using K3b), this time with KDE3. It spits out a barrage of error messages in syslog:

Mar 18 20:58:42 localhost k3b: resmgr: communication failure: Bestand of map bestaat niet
Mar 18 20:59:13 localhost last message repeated 53 times
Mar 18 21:00:14 localhost last message repeated 61 times
Mar 18 21:01:16 localhost last message repeated 57 times
Mar 18 21:02:18 localhost last message repeated 62 times
Mar 18 21:03:20 localhost last message repeated 61 times
Mar 18 21:03:38 localhost last message repeated 23 times
Mar 18 21:03:38 localhost kernel: scsi: unknown opcode 0xe9
Mar 18 21:03:38 localhost kernel: scsi: unknown opcode 0xed
Mar 18 21:03:40 localhost k3b: resmgr: communication failure: Bestand of map bestaat niet
Mar 18 21:03:45 localhost k3b: resmgr: communication failure: Bestand of map bestaat niet
Mar 18 21:03:45 localhost kernel: scsi: unknown opcode 0xf5
Mar 18 21:03:47 localhost k3b: resmgr: communication failure: Bestand of map bestaat niet
Mar 18 21:04:08 localhost last message repeated 10 times
Mar 18 21:04:10 localhost kernel: scsi: unknown opcode 0xeb
Mar 18 21:04:12 localhost k3b: resmgr: communication failure: Bestand of map bestaat niet

(NB: the dutch text means "file or directory does not exist")

 

Then installed K3B on the environment where this started, i.e. 2009.0. Burning a CD works as with Suse and 2008.1 (including the k3b: resmgr messages), but I also get the "kernel: ata2" messages reported at start of this post. The drive locks up as well. Trying this later (after several reboots to test some of these liveCDs) only gives the resmgr messages.

 

Conclusions so far:

* Unlikely that the combination of media and Plextor is the cause -- these have worked here with K3B on Suse, 2008.1 and now also 2009.0. All tests were done on the same type of Sony media. I have been using them before (but not exclusively)

* K3b seems to have something that gnomebaker and brasero do not. It does not lead to the cdrw dropping of the bus (continues to show up when doing a cdrecord -scanbus) and the eject button of the drive contineus to function

* Issue is not specific to Mandriva (Mint has it as well), but seems Gnome dependant

* Part of issue seems to be specific to 2009.0 compared to 2008.1 (the kernel: ata2 messages).

 

The only downside to this for me is that I would need for burning alone a KDE/QT environment (K3b pulls in a whopping 145 MByte of dependencies).

Edited March 18, 2009 by pindakoe

[tux99]

But you said until recently the drive was working flawlessly and you haven't done any hardware changes recently in your PC, not even unrelated ones?

If all that is correct and from the above test results, I would think it's most likely a hardware issue with the drive, CD/DVD burners fail eventually, I had already 3 die on me in the last 12 years.

Even just for the sake of the long term reliability of the data you are burning, I would replace the drive, burners costs so little these days, it's not worth risking your data to a potentially defective drive.

[Guest vnvnvn2000]

I worked for the HP media group before. As far as I know most CD-RW's are optimized to burn at certain speeds. So setting a lower speed will not gain any advantages and sometimes actually reduces the reliability. The CD-R itself will also tell the CD-RW how to write to gain the best result. So if it's rated at 48x then it should be ok to write at 48x, not faster nor slower. I remember our vendors at the time, such as Lite-on, Sony, etc., showed us the report to prove their claims.

 

I work for a CD / DVD replication company now and we have to make copies for the glass mastering. We just burn the copies at the advertised rate of the media and never have any problems.

[scarecrow]

Hi, please take a look here:

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/ke...810.0/1755.html

[pindakoe]

Interim update: also k3b is not free of issues; it does burn, but I had a few lockups of the drive lock (required a reboot to unlock). I have in the mean established that xfburn (an Xfce front-end to libburn) does work just as well (with much less functionality, but sufficient for me). So far I note that brasero and gnomebaker have bigest issues (brasero doesn't even rocgnise empty media in the drive; gnomebaker refuses to burn), k3b burns but with occasional lock-up and xfburn was OK the to times I have used it.

 

I have also realised that one possible hardware change was made in past 6 month -- added a second optical as slave on the same IDE-channel. This one is configured correctly (as slave) and also detected as such). I do not rule out that this in some intricate way causes the issue. When I have a spare moment will disconnect it and try it w/o to see whether this is any more reliable.