It's looking more and more like a disc issue.
Try the decent Verbs/Taiyo Yudens and get back to me if it still happens.
Got the Verbatim DVD-Rs, tried burning, no luck again... the log is attached.
I could not find any DataLifePlus DVDs from Verbatim, only Verbatim CD blanks under that name are on sale, at least where i live. Online shops offer 50-DVD spindels claiming they are DataLifePlus, but those I checked out were not so marked. The ones I bought are marked "Verbatim DVD-R Advanced AZO+ 16x certified", are they decent Verbs, or is this still a media problem?
I also noticed that in BIOS main screen, on the PC in question, in the SATA settings for IDE devices, the setting for optical drive is AUTO, with CDROM and DISABLED as additional choices. Do you think I should I set it to CDROM?
Also the setting for the SATA configuration currently has SATA set to ENHANCED, with configure SATA as IDE (nothing to change there), it can be set to COMPATIBLE. Is this of any relevance?
Not to dwell on ancient history, but I encountered optical IDE-ATA drives which did not function properly if set to slave on a given IDE channel, can you tell me if smthng similar can be happening? The optical drive is currently connected to SATA2, with bootable HDD on SATA1...
log.zip