Re: burning DVD failure

"AlexB" <AlexB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:39D7E845-5BEF-4E95-A391-16AD6FFA1C19@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi there,

I just attempted to burn a DVD on my DELL GX-280 with 2Gb of RAM, 3.8Ghz
CPU. I used a Wscript as such:
.....
The burning began and while watching the process in the Task Manager I saw a
huge increase in Memory (Working Set Memory, I think) up to 1.8Gb. Then after
a few minutes an exception was thrown from WScript: Out of Memory.

I can't replicate your problem directly. I _did_ run your script, slightly modified, and burned a test CD with it with absolutely no problems. The CD was an Ubuntu x64 server bootable install disc, and it worked fine when I used it as a boot disc. This means that your script itself is likely not the problem.

I'm going to try burning a couple of test DVDs with this process to see if it works, but I suspect that your script is fine; it worked beautifully when I tried it. I'm suspicious that one of the elements in the chain of hardware and software you use is causing a problem. Here are a few questions/comments.

... I've burned some picture images on this machine and attempted to
burn iso images but they all came out sort of hollow, although the eventual
file size was close to what I expected the data did not seem to be there and
I could not use the DVD to install the software.

"Hollow" is a pretty good word for a specific situation that can happen with burned discs. Since CD/DVD media are theoretically more-or-less static media, the table of contents is essentially static as well - and the information such as file location and size is written to the TOC as part of the burn process. This is why even when you burn optical media and get a failure, the disc often appears to be ok. The file descriptions are there; it's just the data that's bad.

What you _didn't_ tell us was whether you saw file contents on the DVD you tried to burn that failed.

Is it a known issue?

AFAIK, not at all.

Is it possible to improve the script?

I thought you did a pretty good rewrite. It's slightly different from my style and I'm playing with it now - I'll post back a variation in this thread after I explore a couple of things I think would be nice to control.

Are there other scripts out there that can do the same?

None that I've seen. There's a CDRecorder tool someone has and a couple of commandline tools from Microsoft I believe, as well as mkisofs, but I haven't seen a complete, robust IMAPI WSH script - although I haven't been in newsgroups much the last year.

When I did a CD burn, I found that the memory used by the process rapidly climbed to slightly above the size of the ISO file by the time it was loaded - file was ~522 MiB, and initial RAM used was ~531 MiB. This went up to 562 MiB by the end of the burn. This at least tells us that there's not something suspicious going on with the VBScript storing the stream as Unicode.

Since you saw a continual rise in memory, I suspect that there were problems with writing the data to disc. My guess is that it's one of the following:
+ The index of the CD burner is not 1 on the machine (it can vary when particular PnP devices, including some USB flash drives, are installed or removed). Since you probably saw the recorder light flashing and saw that the DVD did appear to have a partial burn on back, this isn't the likely reason.
+ The CD writer is having trouble writing reliably to the disc. The most likely causes are the following (and note that manufacturer ratings for CD/DVD recorders and media are often slightly fictional):
- CD/DVD writer is malfunctioning/dirty; I'm not a big fan of cleaners, so only try to clean it as a last resort.
- The recorder or the media (or the combination of them both) cannot write the ISO reliably. This could be due to deficiencies in the recorder or the media at the burn speed being used for it. It's most likely to cause problems for data written near the outer edge of the disc on modern, constant angular velocity recorders.

Some questions for you:
(1) What OS version/bitness does the machine have? I'm using Vista x64.
(2) Have you tried test burning a small CD image on the machine?
(3) What is the recorder model and what's the type of DVD media you're using - DVD+R, DVD-R?
(4) Are you certain that the DVD recorder has index 1? You can check the machine with the following script (you've probably done this already, of course).

Dim DiscMaster, i
Set DiscMaster = CreateObject("IMAPI2.MsftDiscMaster2")

for i = 0 to Discmaster.Count - 1
WScript.Echo i, Discmaster.Item(i)
next


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