[CLUE-Tech] CD burning - the devil is in the defaults

[Dennis J Perkins]

Hmm, I would have thought that would improve things, but I do seem to recall 
that Linus had turned off DMA for IDE by default because some support chips 
couldn't handle it properly.

My problem was that the media quality. and possibly the CD-burners too, suffer 
greatly in quality.  My first attempts could only be read by the machine that 
burned them.  The black disks worked on everything but DVD readers.  In talking 
to others, I know this problem is widespread.  My sister's employer had to test 
a number of brands and standardized on one that works for them.


> I have learned something, at the cost of about 20 CDs, a $50 CDRW, and
> three hours, so I thought I might share it here:
> 
> CD burning seems to be ~much~ more reliable when DMA access to the
> 'burner is disabled.  To disable DMA access to my 'burner, root types:
>   hdparm -d0 /dev/hda
> 
> Previous to this lesson, my burns were making coasters of every disc,
> with CRC errors after around 150MB.
> 
> Does anyone want to swap a perfectly good 52x24x52 CDRW for a UPS?
> 
> -- 
> David Willson <DLWillson at TheGeek.NU>
> 
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