LIGHTNING UK!

As it's just 1 error in each of the failed (miscompared) sectors, I'd actually assume this is a memory fault on your PC. Try running memtest86+ on it or something for a few passes. http://www.memtest.org

Your drive reported a 'Write Error'... so it had a problem burning to the discs you're using. Yeah it could be the drive itself but as 'UME' discs are low quality, I'd start by trying some decent ones first.

I meant you can't use them until they've been formatted. Once that has been done, the disc status goes from saying the disc is empty to saying it's complete... and you can never make it 'empty' again*.

A very common firmware bug then - hahaha Some work fine, I remember seeing it with my own eyes. It could also depend on which type of media is being erased/formatted. Either way, the % complete is returned by the drive - with the exception of a quick erase on DVD+RW and BD-RE media, where ImgBurn is just zeroing the first few hundred sectors.

Sorry, I don't really know (as it's not something I have to concern myself with). It's probably done as part of the format.

The % values come from the drive. It's probably a firmware bug.

Remember that DVD+RW are already formatted and ready for writing. I don't really know when the drive has finished doing the LeadIn bit, I just made ImgBurn say it's writing that until it has sent more data to the drive than the drive claims it can fit in its buffer.

Can you just copy + paste the stuff from the Log window please. Screenshots are so much harder to deal with. One of them shows you're using 'UME' discs... they're rubbish, buy some better ones.

That would be down to your playback device.

Your drive can't burn DVDs, it can only read them (and burn CDs).

I don't know. Not really, but trying it on a Silicon Image chipset based card on your PC (or via USB -> SATA adapter) is a good start. Doing so takes the Nvidia stuff out of the equation, but obviously keeps everything else (OS / software) the same. Alternatively, try and get it working via Ubuntu and Wine... but still on your NVidia controller. See above.

It isn't really burning the CUE at all in that write mode, just the files. TAO is rubbish and you'll end up with a disc with forced 2 second gaps between tracks (plus the silence on the end of the files that's meant to be the gaps between tracks - so up to 4 seconds in some cases) and no CD-TEXT.

The old version probably would have just written 2352 byte sectors to the file (because that's what Mode 2 stuff uses). Maybe renaming the file to *.BIN (or *.IMG) would help? It all depends on how those programs you mentioned deal with such file types. ISO files should be 2048 bytes really (Mode 1) and you shouldn't have ever been using ISO for the file extension of Mode 2 CD dumps. There's no flag to automate that conversion prompt, no. I will add one for you though. /CONVERTMODE2TOMODE1 'YES' will convert to Mode 1 and continue to save as *.ISO, 'NO' will rename the file to *.BIN.

Hmm I can't actually see any problem with that. Can you please get him to update the firmware on his drive to the current version (from 1.00 to 1.06) and try again? http://www.firmwarehq.com/LG/GSA-H55N/files.html

That's what I'd have suggested Glad you got it sorted.

Once you've loaded that CUE into Write mode, can you please click the 'View Image Information' button (A disc with a question mark on it in the 'Source' box) and post up some screenshots that let me see everything in the box (it scrolls).

CDA files don't really exists. They're just little pointers to the CDDA sectors on the disc that Windows displays when you browse an audio cd. Rip and convert your disc with something like Exact Audio Copy (EAC)

Whilst it would depend on the SATA -> USB 3.0 adapter being used, in real world tests, you'll never get anywhere near SATA 2 speeds on USB 3.0... or at least I didn't. I did a few about a year or so ago, pairing an SSD (OCZ Vertex 3 MI 120GB) with a USB 3.0 docking station (ThermalTake BlacX 5G) and an adapter (Akasa Flexstor Disklink). Neither of them managed to even reach 200MB/s. The drive would happily do 500MB/s on an Intel Z68 chipset SATA3 controller though.

The application makes no difference. Unless something funny is going on, hardware is always the limiting factor with these things. Go back to the disc that reads at different speeds in different drives and post the disc info from each one. If you're saying the disc info sometimes changes just from reinserting the disc, try to capture that change too. If both drives list the same read speed, they should both be able to read the disc in the same amount of time. The max read speed entry in the log after the read operation should match up and the transfer rate graphs should be nice smooth curves.

Rip lock? Different disc formats read at different speeds too.

How different are they exactly? Both buses are faster than the hardware (at least where reading is concerned) so there shouldn't be anything limiting the read speed except the drives themselves. SATA is loads faster than USB 2.0. You'd be lucky to see 35MB/s on USB 2.0. That's a walk in the park for SATA.

Yes

Read and verify are the same thing. The program is just sending the same 'read' command to the drive for both operations. It will have only failed to read because you were using a different drive - one that wasn't as good at reading the disc. Some are just better / more forgiving than others. If I've misunderstood your post and you were reading it in the same drive that verified it ok, maybe it was due to the drive / disc cooling down. The disc could have been borderline unreadable during the verify and 'just' unreadable by the time you tried to read it. I won't pretend to know how the drive does what it does when it comes to error handling / correction, that's not something software has to worry about. I just issue a 'read' command and the drive either processes it correctly or it errors out.

How is that post any different to your first one? I'm only going to tell you to try some decent double layer discs again - 'MKM-003-00' ones from Verbatim. If they fail too then your drive is probably dirty or broken.