Flash wrote:How old are these DVD burners you're using?
There's no easy way to determine the exact age, the one under discussion is described by Pburn as a "TSSTcorpCD/DVDW".. It's in an external USB enclosure of different origin, so I can't see the manufacturing date without taking it apart. The front panel says "Writemaster DVD Multi". It may be eight years old or so, about the same vintage as my desktop.
The remarkable aspects of this experience are that:
1. pburn 3.7.4/5 cannot recognize a writable DVD-RW (or +RW) in this drive under Puppy, while Burniso2CD (how old is it now?) is able to burn a 3.8GB iso to the same disc without complaint.
2. the resulting burn is good enough to boot repeatedly without problems on two other PCs, one an ancient 500MHz Celeron, the other a three or four year old Toshiba laptop.
3. the Knoppix 7.0.4 LiveDVD burned by Burniso2CD to this disc was also good enough to enable a successful flash install to an 8GB microSD card in a Delkin USB3.0 card reader attached to the Toshiba via a Sabrent expressbus USB3.0 adapter - a process that took well over an hour!
4. the Writemaster burner in question also boots Puppy 5.2.8 for me every day, and often several times a day, but ONLY from a CD-R or CD-RW. Pmount is unable to mount any of the DVD-RW or DVD+RWs , including the Knoppix 7.0.4 LiveDVD successfully burned by Burniso2CD. And Pburn labels them all "no writable media inserted".
5. Pmount IS ABLE, however, to mount an older Knoppix 5xx LiveDVD burned to a DVD+R.
One possible wild card in all of this is that the DVD+RW and DVD-RW's tested MAY have been used at some time in a Toshiba consumer DVD Recorder to record tv programming off the air.
UPDATE: have now tested the same DVD-RW and DVD+RW discs with Pburn and Pmount in the Toshiba laptop's burner, and there they all appear as writable media, and the ones with date are mountable with pmount.
I have also tested them all under Knoppix 7.0.4 on the desktop with the USB burner, using K3B. K3B also shows no media in the drive when these DVDs are inserted, and Knoppix file manager shows no icon for them. So it appears that pburn is not alone in this functional lapse.
The intriguing fact remains that I burned 3.8GB of data onto one of these 'unwritable' discs under Puppy 5.2.8, using Burniso2cd, booted two other PCs with the resulting Knoppix 7.0.4 LiveDVD (several times) without issue, then installed Knoppix 7.0.4 to flash media from this same disc, and have now booted and run two PCs with this flash installation several times without incident.
Evidently, newer is not always better. And I do wonder why Pburn and k3b cannot match the performance of Burniso2Cd in this instance.
Clearly, there is nothing wrong with the way this burner writes to RW DVD's, as the Knoppix 7.0.4 LiveDVD was readable, writable, and bootable in two other PCs. The only explanation I can think of is that the desktop's Intel D865GLC motherboard has some issue with the burner that Burniso2cd manages to overcome.