All CD burners under Knoppix do not seem to be created equal: K3b vs Brasero

[Capricorny]

I just want to give a quick report about my problems with CD writing under 6.2.1 on a Fujitsu-Siemens V3405 laptop.

In short, Brasero was not able to produce readable recordings, even set at lowest speed, with 3 tries. But it reported the burning succesful. While K3b did it at first try. In addition, I had K3b verify the writing - that can be very useful with ISO images.

Before this, I believed that Linux CD burning programs were substitutable, but maybe they are not. Media was Philips 700MB CD-R 52x, and it may well be that media and burning device did not like each other.

I think it is good to be aware of this. Someone will probably blame the distro for bad burning, too

[Clinton]

Thanks for sharing this with us. We've had many posts in the past on the topic of non-working disks and lots of us, including me, keep telling people it's about the burn speed. Burn speed is still important but, if as you say the software makes a difference, that would explain a lot of things.

[Bladeforger]

Exactly what Clinton said! I have had burns go awry with k3b (using Ubuntu, which is my choice for the main O/S these days) and simply forcing a slower burn speed fixed the problem. Also, it's always a good idea to let the cd or dvd burn without a bunch of other things going on in the background. When I used that "other" operating system, I used Nero and it was the same story... I only use k3b now. Find a time when you can let it do its thing without any word-processing, file processing, or internet browsing going on at the same time. Close all the other applications. Pick a burn speed that's slower than 1/3 to 1/2 of the default. That works well for me.

[krishna.murphy]

Exactly what Clinton said! I have had burns go awry with k3b (using Ubuntu, which is my choice for the main O/S these days) and simply forcing a slower burn speed fixed the problem. Also, it's always a good idea to let the cd or dvd burn without a bunch of other things going on in the background. When I used that "other" operating system, I used Nero and it was the same story... I only use k3b now. Find a time when you can let it do its thing without any word-processing, file processing, or internet browsing going on at the same time. Close all the other applications. Pick a burn speed that's slower than 1/3 to 1/2 of the default. That works well for me.

Another (anecdotal) bit of the latest CW is to kill Explorer in that "other" OS before burning; supposedly burn speed then becomes largely irrelevant -YMMV.

Cheers!
Krishna

[Capricorny]

Maybe a small update on possible k3b limitations is in place: Some days ago, I made a DVD of jpg's, about 2GB. k3b clearly got confused, for some reason, and gave up repeatedly, giving different reasons. The fix? Separating the image creation and burning process, using genisoimage to make the iso image first. No problem whatsoever for k3b afterwards, when it just had to chew along on a prepared image