Re: burning DVD failure

"AlexB" <AlexB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:9239B03B-0A97-46A4-8AED-68A5C5807947@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thank you, Alex, I appreciate it. I really do need education on the DVD
burning. A lot of inefficiency results from my skirting the issue.

Well, no one ever tells you this stuff. I was lucky; I did IT support in a machine tool manufacturing firm and a friend of mine who worked in-house with their field support, Don Schmedake, regularly burned CDs for the field guys. Don is extremely detail-oriented, technically astute, and good at explaining things - and always loved talking about his toys. Before I ever got my first CD burner I knew all about the basic problems of optical media burning.

If you're trying to get general info about CDs/DVDs - quality and tools - you may find it worthwhile to check out sites online that are specifically used by people who do a lot of CD/DVD burning. One of the more detailed FAQs:
http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html


I do have Nero. I think it is 7 and I also have an external HP DVD writer
x40, pretty new, still unpacked. You think it would be better to use that
one? Will it be able to handle an iso image?

Other tools do give you advantages over this particular scripted technique for burning a CD/DVD from large images. The core problem comes down to the fact that if you master a CD by giving it data to write, you must provide all data in one operation - which means loading it all and passing it all in one step. Not the best way to handle it. Tools like Nero and various free CD/DVD burners already do that.

I think you may prefer CDBurnerXP, however:
http://www.cdburnerxp.se/

There is a commandline version of it which can be completely automated.


All said and done for software issues such as MSDN downloads I prefer to
deal with scripts or .NET classes. I feel safer with them and a sort of an
assurance that I do understand what is going on.

Yes. And once you know how to do an operation that way, you can automate most aspects of the process. What I most dislike about graphical tools for this job is that 90% of my time is spent doing the same things over and over.

Many thanks again.
--
AlexB


"Alex K. Angelopoulos" wrote:

Nice work on the information display. I think you narrowed the problem down
pretty well anyway, at this point.

The hollow incident - that sounds like purely a bad burn problem back when:
bad disc/drive/memory corruption. From your remark below about the hollow
burn incident back when, that sounds like a classic bad-write-to-disc
problem. AFAIK the only way to test that in general is to do what tools like
Nero do: read the entire disc back after write to confirm that it's ok. That
should be possible from script without an awful lot of trouble.

From the other posts I suspect that we know the problem. I think it really
was an issue with not having enough memory to do everything if writing a
really large file. The ideal way to do this would be to not load it all up
front, but it's not feasible to directly read and write chunks;
step-by-step, since you can't pause a burn. There may be a better way to do
this with the stream if buffering can be offloaded to the stream somehow.
I'll check that out when I have a chance - probably this evening late.

"AlexB" <AlexB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:8CFC657B-F317-4B4E-81C7-509446A88921@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> OK, More information:
>
> I used this script to determine the DVD mount parameters:
> It is a well known TechNet script:
>
> Const IMAPI_PROFILE_TYPE_CDROM = &H8
> Const IMAPI_PROFILE_TYPE_DVDROM = &H10
> Const IMAPI_PROFILE_TYPE_CD_RECORDABLE = &H9
> Const IMAPI_PROFILE_TYPE_DVD_PLUS_RW = &H1A
>
> Set colDiscMaster = CreateObject("IMAPI2.MsftDiscMaster2")
>
> For Each Id In colDiscMaster
>
> Set objRecorder = CreateObject("IMAPI2.MsftDiscRecorder2")
> objRecorder.InitializeDiscRecorder Id
>
> WScript.Echo "Vendor: " & objRecorder.VendorId
> Wscript.Echo "Product ID: " & objRecorder.ProductId
> Wscript.Echo "Product Revision: " & objRecorder.ProductRevision
> For Each strMountPoint In objRecorder.VolumePathNames
> Wscript.Echo "First Mount Point: " & strMountPoint
> Exit For
> Next
> For Each Profile In objRecorder.SupportedProfiles
> Select Case Profile
> Case IMAPI_PROFILE_TYPE_CDROM
> Wscript.Echo "IMAPI_PROFILE_TYPE_CDROM"
> Case IMAPI_PROFILE_TYPE_DVDROM
> Wscript.Echo "IMAPI_PROFILE_TYPE_DVDROM"
> Case IMAPI_PROFILE_TYPE_CD_RECORDABLE
> Wscript.Echo "CD-R"
> Case IMAPI_PROFILE_TYPE_DVD_PLUS_RW
> Wscript.Echo "DVD+RW"
> End Select
> Next
> Wscript.Echo
>
> Next
>
>
> The one with RW properties is DVD+ RW DVD8631. Version 9D03.
> IMAPI_PROFILE_TYPE_DVDROM.
>
> I will read more of your post and try to answer other questions.
>
> BTW, when I said that I observed (this time) that the burning began, I
> only
> saw the mounting memory consumption in the wscript running in Task
> Manager.
> othing appeared onthe disk itself after it was aborted. When I tried to
> burn
> again it accepted this disk as fresh.
>
> When I mentioned the "hollow" media it was after I tried to use Windows
> Media Player to burn a different image, also an MSDN download, also a > huge
> iso file, Visual Stusio 2008, about 5 months ago. It was over 2Gbs but > not
> as
> large as this one. I finally got a DVD in the mail and installed it > from
> there.
>
> Thanks.
>
> -- > AlexB
>
>
> "Alex K. Angelopoulos" wrote:
>
>> "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
>>
>>
>>

.