Sony DVD+-RW DW-D56A PDS7 on Inspiron 6000

[jjldickinson]

One question I forgot to mention: Is it *possible* for some combination of problems (crashes, hanging, stopped processes) to permanently corrupt a DVD+RW that was previously good? Can DVD+RWs be converted into coasters without physically scratching them up or something? Or when I see a DVD+RW that neither Sonic nor Retrospect can erase, does that tell me that something is just getting in the way of proper functioning, in between the software and the disc (e.g. dirt, failing hardware, whatever)?

 

Thanks for any technical insight or gut feel.

[PeterSwiss]

First, try Nero instead of Sonic.

Second make sure you have disabled autoplay (using TweakUI XP from Microsoft, aka PowerToys from Microsoft, do a GOOGLE to obtain it), such that no two programs are hunting for an just-inserted DVD.

Third try re-Custom Configure, after having disabled all kinds of autoplay.

 

I already wrote that autoplay does interfere. What is your feed-back to this?

 

Peter

[jjldickinson]

Sorry, I threw up my hands for a good, long while after a few more fruitless encounters with Dell support. (One technician told me that since my problems were intermittent, it was surely a software problem. Okaaay.... I guess he's never owned an old car. )

 

I turned off autoplay, but I really can't say if that made a critical difference, and I haven't gone back to toggle that setting back and forth in order to see what happens. I'm pretty sure that the real problem was faulty hardware.

 

The key was when my DVD drive failed so utterly and completely that it could not even play a music CD, but just whirred and thrashed, taking 10 or 15 minutes to even read the track names. My thrilling imitations of the noises it was making, over the phone, persuaded Dell to listen up and believe that I was dealing with a hardware problem. Shortly afterwards, a brand new NEC DVD+-RW ND-6650A arrived. As I recall, this is a substitution recommended enthusiastically by Dell forum posters who have seen their Sony burners die. I plugged it in, and began discovering that the Retrospect manual is actually not a work of fiction! Since then, I've gotten busy backing up three different machines over my network, playing with scripts, and beginning to assemble a collection of rotating backup sets.

 

Backups of the Dell, on the Dell, approach 300 MB/min. Backups over a nominally 10 mbps Ethernet network (going through a Dell router which I think may allow about twice the 10 mbps speed as long as it is not offended by the presence of other vendors' equipment) approach 50 MB/min.

 

I cannot prove that the problem was a slow failure of the old drive. Perhaps the custom configuration was flawed somehow, and the drive's later failure was unrelated. (The NEC drive needed no custom configuration, but went right to work with Retrospect.) However, I am willing to believe it was a hardware failure. One mistake I made the first time around was not pushing the DVD burner to its limits as soon as I got it, I suppose. Maybe I could have provoked more failure, sooner. I read CDs and DVDs, and wrote CDs, but never bothered to burn a DVD for several months. After that, I have been flogging the NEC drive without mercy, giving it a thorough break-in.

 

After seeing the first DVD burn very quickly, I began with the second backup set member, and it seemed that perhaps at least some of what I'd seen previously *was* a Retrospect issue: it seemed to hang on erasing. A very ugly approach of rebooting the machine during this process seemed to shortcut erasing, but this was clearly no way to live. Eventually I learned by accident that erasing a new DVD takes about 15 minutes, consistently, using the *short* erase cycle! By experimenting, I found that I could eliminate this by erasing the DVDs in Retrospect before I began a backup operation. That is, I just kept feeding fresh discs to the burner as I worked on other tasks, and erasing them in the background, until I had accumulated a stack of them. When I used these prepared discs during a backup operation, there was almost no interruption.

 

I have not compared erasing in Retrospect with erasing in Nero, which I really don't want to buy just to prepare Retrospect media with; but I did find that erasing with Sonic is irrelevant, as far as Retrospect is concerned. It still wants to spend about 15 minute on this task. I also definitely saw something in the documentation saying that DVDs should be erased using *Retrospect* before use. Sadly, I no longer recall where I saw this: in the Help document, or in the manual. (It would be nice if the documentation and/or the software hinted that taking this long to erase a DVD does not mean the software has hung.)

 

After the first, frustrating experience, I have two discs out of a couple of dozen that still cause an error 206 (dirty heads, bad media, etc.). I don't know if they were irreparably damaged by problems with the old burner and the transition to the new one somehow, if they were somehow just scratched fatally (there's very little visible damage), or if they were defective to begin with. They're both TDKs, and both used in the first trial. The other used TDKs seem fine, and new TDKs and HPs have not caused any problems. It might be interesting to try Retrospect's multi-hour erase cycle on them, and mechanical cleaning.

[PeterSwiss]

Good to learn that it was a hardware defect.

Greets, Peter.

[jjldickinson]

That makes two of us! Thanks for your thought and advice along the way.

 

I've erred on the side of posting too much information, in hopes that some of my experience may contribute to appropriate solutions for others....