LIGHTNING UK!

Have a read of this - http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=18912&view=findpost&p=136270

That's probably down to the HyperTuning / SmartBurn options. There's no artificial limit imposed by the program itself.

Yes, ImgBurn only writes what you tell it. Upon issuing the 'sync cache' command to the drive, the drive is then doing whatever else it wants to do internally. Yes, if I wanted to I could make it mention the 1GB thing in the log. I prefer to go with what's being done command wise though rather than making special exceptions for certain amounts of data on certain media formats for what may or may not be certain drives. You know what's happening and why it's happening, so hopefully you'll be ok now.

It's not the program doing extra stuff, it's the drive. Ideally, the drive would return a % complete for the sync cache process - and that info is already displayed in the status bar when it's available.

You were burning at 2x, that's slow as hell. You can't write less than 1GB to a DVD-RW disc, the drive will make up whatever you don't use. Yes, the drive (not the program) just needed a little more time to finish burning that 1GB (which included your 146MB). If you'd left it a little while longer it would have done everything it was supposed to. 'Cycle Tray Before Verify' is on by default.

Nope, (and to put it bluntly) that's complete rubbish. Once the data hits the drive's buffer (which it is doing just fine), your entire system is out of the equation. (With the exception of something like a faulty psu that can't provide enough power to the drive) The drive and its firmware control every aspect of the burn and the quality of burn you'll eventually end up with. When have you EVER seen burning software say anything in the changelog about improving the write quality on such and such a disc? Exactly, never. That's something you see in firmware release notes. Doing things like enabling 'Perform OPC Before Write' will change how your drive behaves (internally) and could have a positive/negative effect on burn quality but things like buffer sizes, I/O interfaces, IDE/AHCI etc never will. *The comment about buffer size not being an issue assumes there are no problems supplying the drive with a steady stream of data - if you're abusing the hdd during the burn, the drive may have to pause now and then until there's enough data for it to start up again. That might introduce a PIE/PIF at the point of relinking but you'd never notice it. You're only burning at about 5.5MB/s at 4x so it's hardly taxing for a modern hdd. The default 40MB buffer will last about 7 seconds without ANYTHING being read from the hdd - and 7 seconds is quite a long time (to a computer) for nothing to happen.

You can already specify multiple files via CLI but 'Send To' doesn't appear to let you format the output. It just adds them in one long 'space delimited' string and puts quotes round long file names. Of course I'm not going to change the background to white. You are but 1 person! (plus I'd hate it) It uses your Windows colours. If you want white windows, make it so on your own system.

It didn't hang, the drive was still doing its job. Have a little patience. It won't cycle the tray if the write failed because the verify isn't ever meant to start. Why it started for you is unclear at the moment. Are you sure you didn't start it manually?! EDIT: Actually, I can see for a fact that you started the Verfiy operation manually. So I'm sorry but the bug here appears to be with your recollection of events.

Sorry, it's not possible.

Yup, that's the one. It'll look much nicer than the silver one if all the rest of your stuff is black. Plus you'll be able to get max speed out of it via eSATA.

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

Yes but you might also like to take a look at the Sumvision Tempest enclosure. It's USB and eSATA. There's a Tempest LX edition which is just USB.

You might have enabled them at some point during your testing though - I couldn't possibly know that and that's why I mentioned it.

It's hard coded into the firmware. If the drive produces excellent quality burns on those discs at 6x, you don't need 2x. Burn at the speed which actually produces the best quality burns, not the lowest speed because you *think* that'll produce the best quality burns.

Once flashed to stock, just burn at 4x. No special treatment (reset ImgBurn to default settings if you've messed with anything). The eeprom will have been updated/reset during the flash to stock. So any user made FHT, OHT etc changes will be lost - which is what you want. The defaults are FHT/OHT/OS off - SB on.

I explained all that in my second reply - post #7 Be my guest It's always nice to have extra results to compare against.

ok so hypertuning did a better job that time These drives are supposed to learn as they go (and get better) because they can store custom write strategies for something like the last 8 discs and will pick the best one from the selection as a base for the next one. You'd have to flash back to stock firmware to test the actual liteon write strategies.

http://www.totalblankmedia.com/verbatim-dvdr-85gb-8x-10-spindle-p-1657.html

That was with the stock (non overburning) firmware yeah? You can see my scans for that config here - http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=18871&view=findpost&p=136024 Yours isn't a million miles away from it.

After you've reverted to the proper firmware, if you still have the same issue, try with some Verbatim discs. If they also error out in that way you'll probably have to buy a different USB -> SATA adapter. If it still errors out after that then it must be the drive itself.

Judging by the 2.4x write speed, I guess you've fiddled with the write strategies in MCSE. Normally 'RICOHJPN-D01-67' would offer 4x, 6x and 8x. Revert the strategies to what they should be (just reflash with the proper firmware!) and see if you still get the same timeout.

Revert to the ofw and try burning them again. If you don't mind wasting one, use discovery mode and burn all the sectors. As I say, HyperTuning doesn't always work out for the best Ideally you'd just use the LiteOn for overburnt MKM003 (with the settings tailored to it) and use another (better?) drive for everything else.

Ah, that's not a scan of an overburnt disc... it's not even a regular fully burnt disc All you should have to do is burn at 4x and turn OPC on. I'm not even 100% convinced about the OPC thing to be honest - it makes no difference to the results my drive/media achieve. If you're already doing that then you might want to get another spindle of Verbs to test with - and make sure they're from Singapore. ODC v1.51 is out btw.

Right to the end of the test on overburnt media? It's probably just overwriting some memory somewhere and that may or may not make it crash - all depends on how things are laid out in memory at the time.

After doing a bit of research/testing, I've found the firmware c4e released for these drives totally wipes out the write strategy in the firmware for MKM-003-00 media (it's renamed to MKM-0a3-00). As such, MKM-003-00 looks like a totally new and unknown MID/dye to the drive. All the work Lite-On put into tweaking the firmware for the MID/dye goes out the window and instead you have to rely on the drive's 'SmartWrite' feature which basically enables HyperTuning and Online HyperTuning in an attempt to get a decent burn. Sometimes this works well and sometimes it doesn't. You can read about SmartWrite here - http://www.liteonit.eu/en/smartwrite/smartwrite.html You can tell HyperTuning is enabled and running on the drive because the drive LED double blinks during the burn rather than just a steady on/off/on (just enabling OHT doesn't make it do that). The lack of a proper write strategy for MKM-003-00 also means it'll only read/verify up to 8x rather than the usual 12x. You can fix that by using MCSE to rename the MKM-0a3-00 back to MKM-003-00... but then you need to manually enable 'Force HyperTuning' and 'Online HyperTuning' in the eeprom settings (Tools -> Drive -> Change Advanced Settings...) to actually get the thing to burn nicely into the 'overburn' area at the outer edge of the disc (I tried a few tests in Discovery mode with the appropriate number of sectors and kept getting verify errors at LBA 2112480 without them on). Of course once 'FHT' and 'OHT' have been enabled in the eeprom settings, they're on for ALL media (rather than just MKM-003-00) and you may experience worse burns with other media (because it's not using the built-in/default firmware strategies - that's what the 'Force' in FHT means) when just using the drive for normal stuff. Using Opti Drive Control might not be such a good idea at this point... it seems to crash for me when it gets beyond what would normally be the end of the disc. DVDInfoPro works ok though, as does kprobe (but that doesn't update the graph in realtime!)