LIGHTNING UK!

You'll have an early version of 4.56, it's not the real one. Confusing I know... but that 4.56 was just to fix a bug the second after 4.54 was released. External enclosures do indeed have their fair share of problems. Trouble is, very few people will ever blame hardware for problems. It's quite well known now that cd/dvd drives need firmware updates from time to time but who'd ever think to update their enclosure's firmware?! I don't think it's an actual command set problem.... the people that design them spend years on it. It think it comes down to the implementation of that command set, and hence the reason for enclosure firmware updates in the first place.

It's the media quality that's the problem, not the booktype. Changing the booktype lets you play them FULL STOP, it won't improve the readability of them. In any case, sorry but booktyping on DVD-R media is not part of the DVD- (minus) specs.

Go here and get the 'Filter Driver Load Order' program. http://www.bustrace.com/downloads/free_utilities.htm Run it and see what's in the chain. At least you'll know for sure then

Turning that option on for your burner to burn that one single bit of media may lead to problems on loads of others. That's why I make these things optional until they've been tried and tested properly.

It is when you're using Borland! The thought of changing all my instances of AnsiString to WideString scares me! Not only that, WideString isn't/wasn't fully implemented in BCB 6. There are functions available to AnsiString that aren't in there for WideString. It would be a project in itself to do it and not one I'd see any benefit from. It is an english only app after all.

4.56 is ready any day now... not sure why it hasn't gone live actually. God knows what happened with the external drives, that all seems odd to me. 4.52 didn't work with any UDF stuff. When you looked at it, you must have been lucky! It has been fixed now.

I don't work like that timecop. I can't say how well my implementation will work. Chances are it too will not support unicode as the rest of my program doesn't. Stick to the big boys software for that kinda stuff.

There is no way for me to check if it has been successful or not really other than to see if the command was accepted or not. I can but take the drives word for it. In your case, it WAS accepted and came back successful. So basically, next time you burn, check it does actually say 'Closing Track...' and 'Closing Disc...' in the log. If it does and you see no error, the commands have been issued and have both come back as being successful. If it doesn't please send me the FULL log. By full I mean everything from start to finish, not your own custom copy + paste job. Thanks.

So you did use process explorer to confirm this? Maybe the command got muddled up. Do have any odd filter drivers installed that could be stopping the command from reaching its final destination? Maybe one isn't behaving itself properly.

Some driives expect a certain set of commands. If you abort and don't do the last few they can get stuck and wont accept any 'wrong' ones until the 'right' ones have been sent. All you end up getting is a 'command sequence' error.

Can you try again with the log please and just click File -> Save As this time. You'd cut out bits I needed to see. I knew it was going to be big, that's why I said to attach it rather than copy + paste. As for the 'Reserve Track' option, it's named as such in the settings. Look on the 'Write' tab.

Sorry but ImgBurn is not a copying tool, it's just a burning tool. You'd need an (ISO) image of the whatever you're burning before it can be used. So right now, ImgBurn is not the tool for you.... probably best you stick with Nero. Nero should work fine with SP2, just download the updated version. Well v6 and 7 work fine anyway... not sure about versions before those.

Looks like the Close Track command just isn't doing its job then. No error means it should be working - or at least according to your drive it is. I would indeed expect the close disc to error out if close track hasn't been performed (AND worked!) beforehand. Please do the F8 thing as mentioned above then try to close the track again. Same goes for close disc. Save the log and attach it in your reply. I believe Nero actually issues a 'Reserve Track' command before it burns on DVD+R, I do not (as according to the specs it's totally optional). I did however add an option in so you could force ImgBurn to issue it. That's about the only thing I can think of that may cause Nero to work and not ImgBurn. That aside, it's the drives problem if it's not dealing with the close track command properly. I'd say a firmware update may help but the drive looks old now so there probably aren't any. Someone else with the same drive / same problem. http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=167086

Oops, forgot to say that if you do manage to do another burn, please press the F8 key before you start so that it enables all the extra debugging info. Then you'll probably have to save the log to a file and attach it - rather than doing a copy + paste job. EDIT: I actually have a couple of those disc... they're TDK-002-00 dye - yes? I have a topic here with the TDK-003-00 dye, they all burnt + verified fine. http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=832

You'd need to issue Close Track, then Close Disc. That's the standard sequence for DVD+R. Burn another one and just give me the log from that. If that's not possible (are they very expensive?), put a blank in the drive and then copy + paste the info from the little window on the right when in ISO Write mode. Thanks Oh and just because Nero works, it doesn't mean there is an actual problem within ImgBurn. It just means Nero found the real problem (it is used by about 10 million more people!) and so added the workaround first

I don't think there is such a thing. Bugs get posted on the 'mantis' thingy and are fixed from there. I believe that site is mentioned in one of the sticky posts. I don't know of any really active forums that talk about dvdinfopro.

Oops, forgot about the whole 'external' thing! No it won't find your drive then. You really don't want to be using the Nero ASPI though, like I said, it works against you. SPTI is the one that gets tested day in day out and has all the extra features. ElbyCDIO and Patin-Couffin both allow for the majority of extra features, if not all. The Nero ASPI doesn't get any of them. Perhaps you overlooked me asking the question earlier, but have you looked for a firmware update for your enclosure? You will of course need to checkout the chipset it uses first.

I can't imagine for one second this is anything to do with those specific discs - certainly not from an ImgBurn point of view anyway. If they're shown as DVD+R, it'll run all the DVD+R commands. So basically, post your burn log so I can see what the drive thinks and therefore what ImgBurn thinks. It's probably a case of your drive not acting as a drive normally would when you're burning those discs. Again, the log will tell me more. Oh and don't worry, if they're not closed you can easily do that manually via the Tools -> Drive -> Close function.

That's where the low level snooping would come into play. You'd pretty much need to compare what's going on. See the thing is, once it's started saying 'Writing Image' in the log, it has already sent X number of 'Write (10)' commands. All it's then doing is repeating that process over and over and over again. For it to work once, it's silly for it to suddenly stop. That's what makes it hard for me to figure out the problem without some real detective work. When you use ASPI, you're missing out on all the important bits that you can only get with SPTI. Drive locking is an important one of those. Nero's ASPI is just a wrapper for SPTI anyway so it's totally pointless using it over the real SPTI. You'd only adding an extra level of complexity and basically slowing things down! If you had Adaptec's ASPI installed, that would be a different story. It's a REAL aspi layer and bypasses a load of the windows drivers so you get quite a direct route to the drive itself. As for enclosures, I'm quite happy using my ?17 usb/firewire job from www.svp.co.uk Just burnt 2 TYG02/G03 disc using it (combined with a Plextor 712) as can now be seen in the 'Drives and Media' forum. Got excellent scans from both burns.

I don't bother screwing my drives into the usb case, I use that as my quick swap method of testing out all the drives! I put a proper ide cable on it and a power extension to ease swapping drives in and out. Interesting about the USB enclosure, I'd have expected it to be prolific like the usb/firewire one. Not seen that chipset, no, sorry.

The only real way you're going to know what's going on here it to snoop on the commands at a low level. You'll need to see what's actually being submitted to the drive and where it's then not returning any values. I take it I'm ok to assume the 'Buffer' is full when you're saying it's stuck? i.e. so it has the data, it's just not getting to the drive. It could well just be a glitch in the enclosures firmware. They're not always as good as they should be - even though the enclosure being at fault is not something people generally think of!

For me, the 'Available' counter in the 'Physical Memory (K)' box on the 'Performance' tab showed a drop in value every second that matched the write speed of my burner. Once I'd noticed this pattern I didn't bother to keep an eye on it right until the end. What I did see was that it took me down from about 1.2gb free to 400mb. I may have gone beyond that, I don't know. Switched back to 64k transfers and it wasn't even noticable after that. As it's not actually ImgBurn using the memory, memory for the ImgBurn.exe process stayed at 30 odd MB as normal.

You shouldn't wait for a problem to manifest itself, just flash the enclosure and be done with it! Yeah I ordered one of those philips drives today - for no reason at all - I already have a liteon 1635! Just good to have a wide range so I can help people with problems.

looks good to me. Flash with it connected to usb rather than firewire. Mine didn't work on firewire when I first tried it.

No, test mode is only DVD-R/-RW (unless you have a benq). Do you have any decent media to test with? Even with test mode enabled? That 'Write Protect' error isn't one I've ever seen before in my life! It shouldn't be possible... and that makes me think the drive is having problems with that media - or the enclosure is just making stuff up.