LIGHTNING UK!

If that's what your drive reports when you've inserted a blank disc, it doesn't like the discs you're using. Nothing will be able to access the disc or get the drive to burn to it until the drive itself is happy with the disc that's inside it. Can you please copy + paste all of the text from the Log window for me, thanks.

Your drive is pretty old now, possibly too old to actually support the 'RITEK-F16-01' MID properly. Notice you have an 8x burner and are using 16x media, yet the drive only lists 2.4x and 4x as supported write speeds. That's quite common where a drive's firmware doesn't contain support for the disc's MID. It has to resort to a fall back/generic write strategy and only offers low speeds. If it has been working ok with 'RITEK-F16-01' discs up until now, try cleaning the drive with a cleaning disc and using discs from another spindle. If it still doesn't work, you can take your pick out of trying different (better?) spindle of discs or another drive.

Of course it does, it's used successfully by tens (hundreds) of thousands of people all over the world. If your drive wants to error out when burning to a disc then I'm afraid that's its problem. The software simply supplies the drive with data, it's the firmware and chipset in the drive that do/control the burning.

It means the SPTD driver from a company called 'Duplex Secure' can have a negative effect on drive performance..... so basically it means exactly what it says! Having the driver installed can cause slow read/verify operations. You can remove it by using Duplex Secure's installer and just clicking 'uninstall' (or 'remove'... whatever it says). It normally gets installed by programs like DAEMON Tools / Alcohol 120%. Of course you could just ignore it, it's only a warning.

In the drive advanced settings (or eeprom tool), disable online hypertuning and overspeed, then perform a 'clear opc history'. re-enable the burnproof option, it doesn't do anything to DVD+ (plus) format media. The 'perform opc before write' option made no difference for me during testing. I just left is disabled in the end.

Maybe this guide will help? http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=4643

If you don't even see the splashscreen come up, it hasn't got to any of my code. Sorry but I really can't help. It's loading fine for me here. Perhaps check event viewer and see if anything is being logged?

Chances are, it's nothing to do with ImgBurn. Look at whatever you're running antivirus wise.

It's not ImgBurn that's doing the filling/padding, it's the drive. I send it X sectors worth of data to burn, it's burning X+11 so the total count is a multiple of 16. I have no control or say in the matter. I'm saying it wrote the anchor (as that's part of the data I told it to burn), but it then added another 11 sectors worth of padding. The last sector on the disc is then just one of the padding sectors and NOT the UDF anchor like it's meant to be. Anchors can be in 3 places though, so even if the last one isn't there, programs could still check the other 2 positions. Even though another of those 2 would also be invalid (last sector - 256), the first one (sector 256) should be fine. For some reason, Microsoft's tool doesn't seem to want to use that one. Here's a bit of info on UDF anchors. http://www.cnwrecovery.com/manual/UDFAnchorVolume.html

This is problem when drives do what you're experiencing.... the UDF spec says there should be an 'anchor' in the last sector and if they add dummy data after that point, the last real data sector is no longer the last physical sector! So anything that only looks for it in the last sector will fail to find it and just give up. Going by your log... I 12:39:10 Source File Sectors: 1,285,381 (MODE1/2048) - Original ISO I 13:04:59 Source Media Sectors: 1,285,392 (Track Path: PTP) - Burnt disc ... if you were to remove (11 * 2048) bytes from the end of the new ISO created from the burnt disc (via a hex editor or whatever), it would match the original one exactly. When ImgBurn builds ISO files from scratch, it always makes sure their size is a multiple of 16 (or 32) sectors so this kind of problem doesn't happen.

What happens if you mount the ISO in a virtual drive program or open it in IsoBuster? Are the files not then accessible in Explorer or visible in the IsoBuster main window? Do you have logs of the burn / read operations? I'd only expect the 2 files to differ by up to 15 sectors worth of data (15 * 2048) and those differences would be at the very end of the larger image.

Settings don't really give you bad burns, there's nothing the program itself can do to make them better/worse as burning is controlled 100% by the drive. The firmware / chipset in the drive are what deals with all of that stuff.

Please post a log - as per the pink box up the top

Drives sometimes round up the amount they burn to the disc so it's a multiple of the ECC block size (16 sectors). So even if you just want to write 2 sectors worth of data to the disc, it'll come out looking as if all 16 have been used. The 14 at the end will just be filled with zeros or whatever the drive wants to put there.

What causes it is the drive doing a bad job of burning the discs ('CMC MAG-D01-00' MID/dye in that specific case). It burnt it and then couldn't read it back. It took something like 7 burns to find settings that just kept working. Once I'd found them, I didn't do / touch anything and each disc just came out fine.

Acronis TrueImage is what I said it was. I use it and have done so for years. If they've added a 'Cloud' feature in the latest release, that doesn't change the fundamental purpose of the tool. It'll clone drives, take backup images of them (sector by sector and whatever the other method is that it uses) just fine. All you're after is an image of the entire hard drive. To me, it looks like you could take an image of the Win98 machine hdd and store it on an external drive, then attach that external drive to your Windows 7 PC and use VMware vCenter Converter (http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/ ) to make your virtual machine.

Ah yes, bootable discs have to be made bootable using the options on the 'Bootable Disc' tab.

You don't need to clear opc each time, just the once. After configuring the drive's eeprom with the settings I told you, I didn't touch anything and just kept getting good burns after that. Take a look at this post in a thread where I did 12 burns in a row from the same spindle. http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=18871&st=0&p=136519&&do=findComment&comment=136519

Well, that depends on what type of disc it is As it's only a rewritable (and assuming you still have a copy of the ISO safe somewhere), try it and see.

ImgBurn is an optical disc burning program. A proper hdd program would be something like Acronis True Image, Macrium Reflect, Norton Ghost etc. They're hdd backup / cloning tools. I'm sure there must be a way to get vmware to use an image (sector by sector copy) of a hdd. It's not something I've ever had to do, but I'm sure someone will have done and a method for doing so will be available via a Google search.

Sorry, you can't do that with ImgBurn. It doesn't do multisession. You could extract the contents of the ISO to your hdd somewhere, add the folder you want to add and then burn the new compilation.

I've had them with the little higher error rate section at the start like that, but yours seem to be a bit rough around the outer edge of the disc (the layer break point and where it does the 'overburning'). It does vary from spindle to spindle (I usually buy from a few different places). All of this stuff (burn quality etc) is at a level beyond where software has any control or say in the matter, but you might want to go for another clear of the opc history before trying your next one. I've also seen flashing back to the standard firmware (resets something in the eeprom I think) and then putting the modified one back on again can help. Just don't forget to then double check the drive/eeprom hypertuning etc options again before making yet another burn

You can't use ImgBurn to take (or build) an image of your Win 98 machine's hard drive so it can be used as a bootable ISO, things don't work like that. I know you can give vmware access to physical hardware but that might not be ideal (unless you don't mind moving the old 98 hdd into your new pc). Is there no way you could just install the Win 98 OS from scratch in a new VM and configure it the same as your old physical machine? If that's too much hassle, take a complete image of the old 98 hdd (using a proper hdd tool) and then see about converting that into VMWare format.

Can you post the ImgBurn log and the kprobe graph itself please. Those values still look a little high to me. Different spindles can produce different results though and even that place that makes the discs can make a difference. The ones from Singapore seem to be the best.

Sorry, I can't help your drive making a bad burn. You might be able to work around the issue by changing a couple of settings (write type, perform opc before write etc) but the drive burns, not the software. I can't make it do a better job than it wants to.