LIGHTNING UK!

If you're feeding MP4 files into ImgBurn, that's what you'll end up with on the disc - because ImgBurn isn't a conversion / authoring tool. Are you sure your *working* discs only just have MP4 files on them? A DVD player would normally require a proper set of DVD Video files - made up of IFO/VOB/BUP files in a VIDEO_TS folder. Anything other than that will be hit and miss in standalone players.

It's ok, I know you weren't putting blame anywhere, I was just explaining how these things (drives) actually work From what you've said, it seems as though any read error will cause your drive to disconnect. It's probably a 'bus timeout / reset', but it still shouldn't really be happening. It would make dealing with a problem disc an absolute nightmare! Can I ask you to right click on the drive selection drop down list and pick 'Family Tree', close the box that pops up and then copy + paste everything from the log window please? Maybe we can improve things for you so it doesn't misbehave in future when a read error occurs.

The drive actually has complete control over the read speed. You, via ImgBurn, can ask the drive to read at whatever speed you like, but it's down to the drive to accept it and actually read at that speed. Sometimes the speeds might be constant over the entire disc surface, others might gradually ramp up over the surface - 2 different ways of working - CLV and CAV (constant linear velolicy and constant angular velocity). If your drive doesn't have any problem reading the disc, the settings for 'Ignore Read Errors' and 'Software Retries' don't make a difference. They're there for when the drive *does* run into problems with it. As for 'ImgBurn did something weird and even disconnected from the drive'... being able to see the log would have been useful here. The drive may vanish from Windows and that gets mentioned in ImgBurn's log. Again, the program is at the mercy of the drive (and Windows) here. I'm glad you've finally managed to produce an error free image of your disc.

It’s only corrupt on the disc - because the drive can’t read some of what it just wrote. Do you have access to another drive you could use?

Your current drive / media combo doesn’t appear to work, so you’re basically left with two choices. Either you’ll have to get some different discs and hope the drive likes them more or you’ll have to get a different drive and hope it likes your discs.

As you’ve burnt at max speed, try slowing it down a bit. At that speed, your drive is burning discs it then can’t read back. I’m guessing the drive is old because i doubt they’ve made a cdrw/dvdrom combo drive for several years now.

Glad to read that the standard Microsoft ahci driver seems to be working ok for you. I used to swear by the RST drivers when I was running my Z68 motherboard (driver v10 back then I think), but then heard about lots of issues when v11 came out and it doesn't appear to have gotten any better. I'm sure the drivers are fine for hdd/ssd etc, but something obviously isn't right when it comes to optical drives. I still only ever really buy Dell for where I work - mainly their Optiplex SFF business machines. Whilst they're in warranty, their support is great and things get fixed quickly (hardware wise). I wouldn't call them for software issues like this - but then it's my job to resolve these things and if I can't do it (with or without the aid of Google), I very much doubt a 1st line Dell tech can either.

Couple of things to try here.. From what I can tell, there's an updated version of your AHCI driver available. I've seen 18.36.4.1022 mentioned around when Googling. Perhaps give that a go? Failing that, try going back to the Windows AHCI driver, which calls itself 'Standard SATA AHCI Controller'. To do that, locate your AHCI controller in Device Manager, right click it and select 'Update Driver'. Select 'Browse my computer for drivers' and then select 'Let me pick...'. You should then see the standard driver listed in the options. Select it and click Next etc. I'm running the standard driver without any issues... but I'm on a 300 series board, not a 500.

All drives behave differently. Some are better at reading problem discs than others. What I didn’t like about your log was that the drive seemed to disconnect itself from the system once it ran into a sector it couldn’t read - that’s not good / normal. Maybe it’s due to the controller it’s connected to or the drivers installed for said controller.

Post the log please.

It sounds like your drive is occasionally doing a bad job of burning the discs and they’re then unreadable - hence failing at the verification stage.

That would need to have been because of a different issue (like analysing gaps between tracks or something). An unreadable disc is an unreadable disc - they only have access to the same commands (to 'read' a sector) as I do.

If your drive still can’t read the disc, there isn’t much you can do about it. See if you can read it using another drive.

It’s ok, your text version was enough. Thanks anyway though. Not sure how you managed to burn that image with AnyBurn, it rejected it for me. I also tried it with the non-Christmas version of Nights and it made a right mess of the disc (incorrect track sizes etc.)

My cue doesn’t actually match the one from here - http://redump.org/disc/7004/ - but it was the only dump of it I could find easily. Can you post your cue file please?

When I burnt it, it was only the 150 sectors in the pregap of track 2 that weren’t right. That doesn’t affect the actual data, so it might be fine. Does it actually play?

Does your bin/cue image consist of 20 bin files? I take back what I said last night, the image I have here for the christmas version of Nights doesn't specify PREGAP in the CUE, it's making use of INDEX 0 and taking data from the corresponding BIN file. The non-christmas version used PREGAP. Looking at the 2nd bin file (which is the bin for track 2), I can see that byte 15 is set to 01 (in each of the first 150 sectors (of 2352 bytes) of the file), when it should be 02 if it's a mode 2 track - as specified in the CUE file. So in my case at least, the BIN/CUE are wrong.

I will look into it. It would have helped to see the actual error in the log, but going by the CUE I found online, it's noticing differences in a pregap sector - and they're generated by the program.

Somewhere in the product listing you should see the various read and write speeds for the different media types supported by the drive. Are you after a dvd drive or a bd drive?

The speed of the connection can and will limit the speed of the drive. A fast bd drive won’t work properly over a usb 2 connection. I doubt you could buy a recent model that doesn’t have the correct connection type required to achieve what the drive is capable of. Therefore, you probably don’t need to worry too much.

ImgBurn doesn’t instruct the OS to ask you to run it elevated. Apps configured like that have the little yellow shield in the icon. If UAC is disabled, obviously it won’t prompt - because everything then runs as admin. When enabled, it’ll prompt if the app asks to be elevated - which again, ImgBurn doesn’t.

Post the log please.

ImgBurn is not a command line tool and the flag to eject is only looked at after an operation (read/verify/burn etc) has completed. There's no way to use it to just eject the disc like that.

Not at all like an idiot, don’t worry [emoji1303] If you’re doing tests and making comparisons, it’s just best to test like-for-like (as much as possible anyway). So the iso must be played from a virtual drive and you must then use the same software player to play the burnt disk.

Are you mounting the ISO as a virtual drive and then playing from the virtual drive, or are you simply loading the ISO in whatever playback tool you've chosen to use? The two methods could cause the playback software to behave differently. If the ISO is really ok, there's no reason for it to behave differently when burnt to disc - subject to the device being able to read the disc nicely / quickly enough. Whilst there are probably people on the forum that could offer some advice, your issue doesn't sound like it's related to ImgBurn... or even burning in general. You might be better off asking for help at somewhere like videohelp.com