5.0 - DVD-R - Pioneer - 206 errors

[erikober]

I am running Workgroup 5.0 on a B/W G3 and archiving to an external firewire QPS DVD-CDRW which has a Pioneer 103 mechanism. I have successfully written to 3 DVD-Rs and intermittently no success on four other attempts to the exact same type of media. I receive an "error 206-trouble writing hardware error, bad media, dirty heads". I haven't had one error when burning DVD-R through Toast Titanium. Just out of curiosity I set up the same configuration on a different machine running OS 10.1.3. The OS X version of Retrospect came up with this error:

 

"Internal consistency check failed: Assertion check @ dev.c-1047"

 

 

 

Any ideas out there?

 

 

 

thanks.

 

 

 

BTW, I unpleasantly discovered that Dantz will not offer free support for this new 5.0 product because I purchased an upgrade instead of the full version. The upgrade won't do me much good if I can't make it work consistently. So much for standing behind your product.

[IrenaS]

This certainly isn't how Retrospect should be functioning. We need to do a little investigation to find out what's happening.

 

 

 

What OS is running on the first computer?

 

 

 

It sounds to me like you wrote 3 DVD-Rs sucessfully. The four failed times -- do you mean that 4 other DVD-Rs of the exact same type failed? Were these incremental backups to the DVD-Rs that worked?

 

 

 

Can you tell me at EXACTLY what point you get the assert on the OS X machine? Is it reproducible?

 

 

 

Thanks

[erikober]

Thanks for replying. Here is where I'm at since I posted last. I'm starting to get the feeling this is a hardware issue after all. Eventually on the machine I was primarily using, the drive completely dissapeared. The system profiler would not even show the device being present on the firewire bus. I placed the drive on two other machines and observed the same behavior. I then purchased and installed a brand new high grade 6-pin firewire cable. The drive then did show up. I just attempted to do another archive session and Retrospect got through 3.7 gb of a 4.1 gb session and then failed with another 206 error.

 

 

 

What does it sound like to you?

 

 

 

thanks.

[IrenaS]

It's certainly sounding like a hardware issue. If it disappears from the Apple System Profiler, it's likely more serious that a bad Retrospect driver. If you continued using it I bet it would eventually have problems outside Retrospect, even with the new cable. Do you get the same behavior on the other computers with the new cable as well?

 

 

 

Have you tried contacting the vendor of the drive? They might have additional diagnostics.