LIGHTNING UK!

Bring up a command prompt window (running as admin user) and try typing in: net localgroup "Performance Monitor Users" "%USERNAME%" /add It basically does the same thing only involves using the keyboard rather than the mouse

You might like to try slowing the burn speed down to 16x or 24x too. It'll produce a better burn. Taiyo Yuden seem to make the best CDR's too. I ditched Verbatims (normally great for optical media) in favour of them a while ago and I've never looked back.

It doesn't really matter if it may or may not cause problems if you try to burn something different. The drive isn't playing nicely when the program tries to burn using SAO (the actual data being burnt is totally irrelevant) so (assuming it works) you're stuck with TAO anyway.

Try just the firmware first though

You could try changing the 'Write Type' to TAO, maybe your drive is so old that it doesn't like SAO (or at least not how I'm trying to set it up). That's what happens when the drive is ancient and doesn't comply with the MMC specs ImgBurn is built around

You could try using the TAO write type for burning, maybe the drive just doesn't like doing SAO onto those discs.

It would appear the 'expert' doesn't know as much about ImgBurn as he/she thinks they do. ImgBurn doesn't allow spanning in any way, shape or form.

Can you burn other discs ok (non DL ones) ?

What exactly is missing in Vista basic that the guide doesn't work? Is the group not in the list or can you not even get so far as seeing the list?

Normally SATA drives will show up as ATA, AHCI, SCSI or RAID (RAID being the worst one for it to be on). I'd don't recall ever seeing a computer report 'Fibre' before so something isn't right with your setup. That whole thing is wrong. You might be getting corruption on the entire structure, it's hard to say without looking at the exact response data. What I'd probably do now is put the drive in another machine and see if it does the same thing. Can I assume that if you flash the drive with the official firmware you have the exact same problem of the 'Last Recorded' info showing as HD DVD-RW or whatever? (you need to rule out the patched firmware).

As the ADIP and Last Recorded structures should be identical for blank media, I'm not really sure why your system is feeding garbage to ImgBurn. Have you figured out why the system is reporting that the drive is connected via Fibre rather than ATA/AHCI etc yet? Ignore the disc info in the panel on the right, the bitsetting dialog itself will tell you what the drive thinks it should do when it burns a disc.

It's not ImgBurn hating them, it's them hating ImgBurn! I'm not aware of a single command the program could ever send that causes them to mess up every time without fail... if there was then I'd try to work around it. All that's happening is ImgBurn is triggering some flaw in them... think of it as I/O stress testing

Hmm well you could try changing the single layer media profile to a huge value (as in, one larger than a DL disc), then the program would always think the image is single layer sized. Of course if you ever do any real burning you should put it back on DVD+R or DVD-R!

You can't and you shouldn't ignore layer break options anyway. Leave the DL ones until last and then go through them all and pick the right one for the project.

What drivers have you installed for your motherboard SATA controller? Try uninstalling them and just using the standard Microsoft ones. What do the IDE controller and SCSI/RAID controller branches look like in Device Manager? (try and get a screenshot or something) I don't think the 0xA8, 0x03 error is coming from the drive itself because the pioneer drive specs don't say the drive is capable of returning such an error code. Error codes from drives are normally all in the 0x00 -> 0x7F range and yours is 0xA8 - thus making it look like it's coming from some other device/driver.

Otpical drives don't like running on controllers working in 'RAID' mode. Make sure the SATA controller is configured as IDE/Standard in the BIOS (or AHCI if all else fails), but make sure it's not on RAID. Then get down the latest storage / sata drivers for your motherboard from the chipset manufacturers website. (i.e. Intel, NVIDIA etc)

I normally use 'hex workshop' but something like 'Beyond Compare' with the hex viewer plugin would work just fine too. When you know which bytes have been changed (and their offset from the start of the file - probably going to be in the first 2048 bytes of the file), open said IFO/BUP file in IfoEdit and see which field is at that location.

It changes them to correct things that are wrong... and that's only ever going to be the various offsets that are fixed by a quick 'fix/get vts sectors' type function (from the ifoedit days). It's not hard to compare the modified files against the originals and see exactly what's changed. Do that and you'll have your answers.

Yes of course it's a bit daft having it that way but then the program erases automatically before you burn so why bother with it at all? The erase function needs it's own 'mode' just as much as the 'audio cd' one does... but that'll only happen when I feel like doing it. Yes there's a (long) beta phase and no it's not public.

Yes I've used Verbatim BD-RE (25GB) without any problems in my GGW-H20L (currently with YL03 firmware). I've also used a TDK BD-RE DL (50GB) disc with it and that formatted / burnt / verified just fine too. Mine all came from www.svp.co.uk but it seems they're only stocking the 5 packs of Verbatim BD-RE discs at the moment and the TDK BD-RE DL's are nowhere to be seen!

No, we really couldn't! Erase works with the drive currently selected in whatever mode you're in - and once again, there is no active drive in the Ez-Mode Picker screen. It wouldn't make sense to randomly select a mode and automate a click on the 'Erase' button (bottom left of the 'Destination' device box) because you might not have the right drive selected. As for there being 6 options and 5 mode, well 2 of them are both 'Build' mode but with a different 'Output' mode set. (Device / Image File)

So when it tries to format it the drive / program just throws up an error? Save yourself a lot of time and just buy some verbatim bd-re instead! They've always worked ok for me.

Sorry, this isn't the place to be asking 'ripping' questions. Please proceed to another forum that deals with that kinda stuff.

'Ez-Mode Picker' is exactly what it says, it's an easy way for the (less clued up) user to pick the correct 'Mode'. There is no 'Erase' mode, hence why it's not on the Ez-Mode Picker screen. There isn't an active drive when you're on the Ez-Mode Picker screen, hence why 'Erase' isn't (and all the other drive related options aren't) available. Audio support comes from CUE file support, there is no 'Mode' for making an audio disc... in time that'll no doubt change but I wanted to keep things as simple for me as possible until I was happy with how the internal code was working. Creating an audio disc is a 2 part process. First you must create a CUE file, then you load the CUE file in Write mode. So everything is just fine as it is.

It was probably a fluke burn - I bet the quality of it was pretty low. btw, 'firmware' is not a driver, it's like the OS (operating system) for your drive (stored on the drive itself) and controls everything to do with burning.