Retrospect not recognizing disks it wrote

[jdavidbakr]

I'm having an issue with Retrospect not recognizing disks it wrote, even as soon as putting it back in for verify. It identifies the disk as "erased." This happens about half the time (sometimes more). I'm trying to do a pretty large backup of a big project and Retrospect recognized 14 of the 28 DVD+R's it wrote to for the backup. Is it possible it's the media?

 

I'm running on an iMac G5 10.4.7, Retrospect version 6.1.126.

[CallMeDave]

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Is it possible it's the media?

 

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Anything is possible.

 

Maybe you could provide lots and lots of specific information for people to read and consider?

 

Dave

[jdavidbakr]

Well, the only additional information I can think to include is that the media is Verbatim DVD+R, and the drive is MATSHITA UJ-825. The unrecognizability of a disk is unpredictable but, like I said, on this recent backup it happened exactly half of the time. Sometimes it would work for 2 or 3 disks and then stop working. Every time I would put a disk in and it said "Empty" I ejected it and tried again 3 or 4 more times, and then finally told it to skip the disk. Once in a while it would recognize it maybe on the 2nd or 3rd time but most of the time it just sat there and stared at me like I inserted a brand new disk.

[rhwalker]

Jon,

 

I don't know anything about the age of your computer or environmental issues for its surroundings, but could this be something as simple as dust on the lens, etc., of the DVD drive, or an aging laser? Is this failure progressive or instead is is correlated with some recent software change? (drive firmware, OS update, RDU update, etc.) Or perhaps a recent batch of media?

 

Russ

[CallMeDave]

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Well, the only additional information I can think to include is that the media is Verbatim DVD+R, and the drive is MATSHITA UJ-825

 

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- How 'bout the version of the RDU (Retrospect Device Update) that's loading with the program?

[CallMeDave]

Just as a data point, I have an iMac G5 with the Matshita UJ-825, and it's never worked well for me. Besides ejecting disks onto the floor, it's very particular about DVD-R media that it will write 4X to, defaulting to 2X even on some high quality Taiyo Yuden media but not others.

 

Trying to use this drive with DVD+R media (at the time, bargin OfficeMax disks) resulted in just a grinding noise and force quitting Retrospect.

 

Now that I own a new Core Duo iMac with a UJ-846, backups to DVD-R and DVD+R scream along happily at full speeds (depending on the Sources).

 

I'd say its quite possible that the UJ-825 simply sucks eggs.

 

Dave

[jdavidbakr]

Retrospect has not played nicely with my iMac G5 from the day I got it. I have a whole archive from my older iMac that is on DVD-R, but Retrospect will not recognize DVD-R's, they have to be DVD+R's on the drive that I have. (That's straight from Retrospect). I bought a spindle of DVD+R's and am not quite to the end of it, so I haven't bought more. But my original backups of my documents etc. that have been smaller seem to work ok (I've only had one disk go bad out of 8). I wonder if the drive gets too hot when doing a huge backup and is somehow messing up Retrospect's ability to read it?